














Class 

Book. 


3 Rs°n 


ua 


Gopight N? 


\°[lA 


C0l*/R1GHT DEPG 








f 





i‘Y 




















I 






l 




% 

























V 










1 






VICTORIAN POETRY 


John Drinkwater 


(iDORAN'Sjl 

)modernC 

/READERS’V 
lOKSHELFl) 



DORHF(’S MOVERS^ 
REAVERS’ BOOKSHELF 

V 


ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 
Gilbert K . Chesterton 

THE STORY OF THE RENAISSANCE 
Sidney Dark 

VICTORIAN POETRY 
John Drinkwater 

THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTURE 
Frank Rutter 

ATOMS AND ELECTRONS 
J. W. N. Sullivan 

EVERYDAY BIOLOGY 
J. Arthur Thomson 


Other Volumes in Preparation 





VICTORIAN POETRY 

BY 

JOHN DRINKWATER / 


NEW 



YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






•33 C> 

/ n s-ff 

.217 

M&.*h 

Co /Y L 


COPYRIGHT, 1924, 

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


1 



VICTORIAN POETRY 
— B — 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

APR 22 ’24 * 

©C1A792018 a / 


TO 

GEORGE GORDON 


» 





GENERAL INTRODUCTION 


Of all human ambitions an open 
mind eagerly expectant of new discov¬ 
eries and ready to remold convictions 
in the light of added knowledge and 
dispelled ignorances and misapprehen¬ 
sions, is the noblest, the rarest and the 
most difficult to achieve. 

James Harvey Robinson, in 
“The Humanising of Knowledge 

It is the purpose of Doran’s Modern Read¬ 
ers’ Bookshelf to bring together in brief, 
stimulating form a group of books that will be 
fresh appraisals of many things that interest 
modern men and women. Much of History, 
Literature, Biography and Science is of intense 
fascination for readers to-day and is lost to 
them by reason of being surrounded by a for¬ 
bidding and meticulous scholarship. 

These books are designed to be simple, short, 
authoritative, and such as would arouse the 
interest of intelligent readers. As nearly as pos¬ 
sible they will be intended, in Professor Robin- 
[vii] 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION 


son's words quoted above, “to remold convic¬ 
tions in the light of added knowledge." 

This “adding of knowledge" and a wide¬ 
spread eagerness for it are two of the chief 
characteristics of our time. Never before, 
probably, has there been so great a desire to 
know, or so many exciting discoveries of truth 
of one sort or another. Knowledge and the 
quest for it has now about it the glamour of an 
adventure. To the quickening of this spirit in 
our day Doran's Modern Readers' Book¬ 
shelf hopes to contribute. 

In addition to the volumes announced here 
others are in preparation for early publication. 
The Editors will welcome suggestions for the 
Bookshelf and will be glad to consider any 
manuscripts suitable for inclusion. 

The Editors. 


[viii] 


PREFACE 


This book is called Victorian Poetry for 
convenience. It does not, it need hardly be 
said, pretend to anything like a thorough ex¬ 
amination of the voluminous poetry of the 
Victorian era in all its aspects. Significant crit¬ 
icism of Tennyson alone, to take a single in¬ 
stance, has already filled many volumes, a re¬ 
flection which may well make the title chosen 
for this little book look like an impertinence. 
But while the present study does not profess to 
any exhaustiveness, it is about Victorian poetry, 
so that I may perhaps be allowed the choice, 
which is an easy one. 

Certain omissions in the poets dealt with 
will occur to every reader. Chief of these, per¬ 
haps, is Mr. Thomas Hardy, but although Mr. 
Hardy might be claimed as at least partly Vic¬ 
torian in date he seems as a poet to belong to a 
later age in everything else. His own achieve¬ 
ment is post-Victorian in character, and his in- 
[ix] 


PREFACE 


fluence upon the tradition of English poetry is 
one that is too presently active for definition 
yet awhile. So that I felt that to bring a con¬ 
sideration of his poetry into these notes would 
be to disturb the balance of the scheme. The 
same thing may be said, perhaps with rather 
less excuse, about George Meredith. He, 
more strictly than Mr. Hardy, belongs to the 
Victorian age, but it is by accident rather than 
by character. American poetry, save for a cas¬ 
ual reference here and there, I have not men¬ 
tioned at all. To have done so would not have 
furthered my design, nor could I have done it 
adequately within that design. Whitman, who 
is a law unto himself, could come into no de¬ 
sign and needs a separate gospelling. 

This brief study inevitably deals chiefly with 
the work of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, 
Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris. Poets of al¬ 
most equal eminence, such as Coventry Pat¬ 
more, Mrs. Browning and Christina Rossetti, 
are less constant motifs , but, I hope, not un¬ 
duly neglected. Of the great number of less 
celebrated poets, who contributed beautifully 
to the poetry of their time, I have referred onjy 


PREFACE 


to such as have afforded some apt illustration 
for an immediate argument. Poets like Landor 
and Emily Bronte, although they worked into 
the early part of the period dealt with, Landor, 
indeed, well into it, have not been treated as 
Victorians, since they belonged by nature no 
more to the Victorian age than did Words¬ 
worth. 

There could be no hard dividing line be¬ 
tween the two parts of the study. Frequent 
references to the content matter of Victorian 
poetry were inevitable in a consideration of its 
technique, just as it has suited the argument 
often to refer back from the substance to the 
manner. For the rest, the main purpose of the 
essay has been merely to note some poetical 
characteristics of an age and their relation to 
the poetical characteristics of other ages. 

I have used such terms as Augustan age and 
Romantic age as meaning what they are com¬ 
monly held to mean in English criticism. That 
their fitness as terms may be sometimes chal¬ 
lenged by critics of authority does not matter 
for the present purpose. They are convenient 
labels and may as well be used as any others, 
[xi] 


PREFACE 


In choosing quotations for illustrative pur¬ 
poses, I have inclined when possible to such 
passages as are commonly known to readers of 
poetry, and since this book may be read by 
some who are not so erudite as my critics will 
be, I have thought it not superfluous to set out 
even so familiar a piece as Crossing the Bar , 
shall we say, in full. 


CONTENTS 


PREFACE 

Part I 

THE MANNER OF VICTORIAN POETRY 

I THE POET AND HIS AGE ..... 
II DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY .... 
Ill THE PROBLEMS OF THE VICTORIANS 

iv Tennyson’s diction ..... 

v browning’s diction. 

vi Tennyson’s influence—the diction of 

ARNOLD, ROSSETTI, MORRIS AND SWINBURNE 

VII. browning’s INFLUENCE-R. H. HORNE- 

ALFRED DOMETT-T. E. BROWN-COVENTRY 

PATMORE ....... 

VIII CONCLUSION OF PART I . 

Part II 

THE MATERIAL OF VICTORIAN POETRY 

I. INTELLECTUAL FASHIONS .... 

II, SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE POETRY-NAR¬ 
RATIVE POETRY-MACAULAY-MORRIS-PO¬ 
ETIC DRAMA ...... 


PAGE 

ix 


17 

22 

54 

71 

92 

102 

142 

155 


159 


[xiii] 


164 - 


CONTENTS 

hi “the idylls of the king”—Tennyson’s 

CRITICS-HIS METHOD-A DEBATABLE ELE¬ 

MENT in tennyson’s work—moral judg¬ 
ment in poetry—tennyson’s public 

AUTHORITY ....... 

IV, THE RANGE OF SUBJECT MATTER IN VICTORIAN 

POETRY-THE OCCASIONAL ELEMENT-MRS. 

BROWNING-CHRISTINA ROSSETTI - FITZ¬ 
GERALD-SPIRITUAL ECSTASY . . 

V LOVE POETRY AND THE VICTORIAN USE OF 
NATURE ...... , 

VI CONCLUSION. 

INDEX ........ 



PAGE 

176 

209 

221 

230 

233 


Part I: THE MANNER OF 
VICTORIAN POETRY 
















VICTORIAN POETRY 


Part I: THE MANNER OF VICTORIAN 
POETRY 

Chapter I 

The Poet and His Age 

T HE division of poetry into periods is arti¬ 
ficial and yet not without reason and its 
uses. If we look at the poets of an age at close 
quarters we shall commonly find little resem¬ 
blance between one and the other. A liberal 
reader of poetry in 1670, for example, would 
be discussing the recently published Paradise 
Lost , he would know John Dry den as a poet 
who was establishing a reputation, he might 
still have bought from his booksellers the first 
edition of Herrick’s Hesperides and have found 
on the poetry table the early issues of John 
Donne, Richard Crashaw, Henry King, Rich¬ 
ard Lovelace and Henry Vaughan, among 
[17] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


others. In these, his contemporaries, our reader 
would naturally see an immense variety of 
technical method, spiritual mood, and tradi¬ 
tional allegiance. Cavalier and Puritan, secu¬ 
lar and religious, these would be schools clearly 
distinguished in his mind, and little enough re¬ 
lation would be apparent between the monu¬ 
mental epic of Milton and the primrose lyric 
of Herrick. And yet these were all seven¬ 
teenth-century poets, and at this distance we 
perceive something characteristic in seven¬ 
teenth-century poetry that touched the work of 
all these men alike. We to-day are going 
through the same experience with our own con¬ 
temporaries. Two hundred years hence Geor¬ 
gian poetry—and in this term I do not include 
only the work of the poets selected by Mr. 
Marsh for his anthologies—will have certain 
clearly definable characteristics which for the 
reader mark it apart from the work of other 
ages. And yet to us, if we really read the 
poetry and do not merely pick up a smattering 
of critical generalisation about it, the differ¬ 
ences must be found more striking than the 
resemblances. At close quarters it is absurd to 


THE POET AND HIS AGE 


pretend that there is any close kinship between 
the work of, say, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, 
Mr. W. H. Davies, Mr. Walter de la Mare, 
Mr. John Masefield and Mr. Wilfred Wilson 
Gibson. What happens is that there are two 
governing influences in all poetry of any conse¬ 
quence, the poet’s own personality, and the 
spirit of the age. That personality is some¬ 
thing which is plain to a sensitive reader from 
the first, but the spirit of an age is hardly ever 
definable to the age itself. Criticism may al¬ 
ready be sure about the personal quality in the 
work of Alice Meynell or A. E. Housman, can 
in some degree say why it is personal and mark 
in each case its particular contribution to the 
record of the human spirit, but criticism cannot 
clearly at present say what it is that relates 
these two poets to each other or both of them 
to Gordon Bottomley. That there is such a 
relation only becomes an established fact when 
we look back and see it asserting itself among 
the poets of a period from one age to another. 
Milton was a poet engaged in a titanic struggle 
with the problems of the soul, believing but 
battling always for his faith, blending in one 

[ 19 ] 



VICTORIAN POETRY 


mood a stern asceticism with voluptuous pas¬ 
sion, a poetical technician familiar with every 
classic example and at the same time liberal 
in experiment; and just such a poet in his own 
measure was Matthew Arnold. Herrick, on 
the other hand, for all his parsonage, was the 
lyrist of fleeting beauty, of ghosts in the blos¬ 
soming meadows, of exquisite and poignant 
moments, with no gospel but that with beauty 
loved comes beauty lost, a poet who used sim¬ 
ple and established measures with perfect mas¬ 
tery and little questioning. And so again on 
his own scale such a poet was Swinburne. And 
yet in some essential respect Milton is of a 
kind with Herrick and Arnold of a kind with 
Swinburne far more clearly than is Milton 
with Arnold or Herrick with Swinburne. 
When the question of personal quality has been 
Anally considered Milton and Herrick remain 
of the seventeenth century and Arnold and 
Swinburne of the nineteenth. The purpose of 
the present essay is to ascertain as far as pos¬ 
sible what it is that distinguishes what we call 
the Victorian age in English poetry from the 
great ages that preceded it. In order to do this 
[ 20 ] 


THE POET AND HIS AGE 


it will be necessary to consider the personal 
quality in several poets, but this will be done 
rather to discover the common spirit than to 
present a series of individual studies. 


[ 21 ] 


Chapter II 

Diction in English Poetry 

Q UEEN VICTORIA came to the throne in 
1837. The date is not an inconvenient 
one to set at the beginning of a study of the 
poetry of the age to which she gave her name. 
Shelley, Byron, and Keats were dead, Words¬ 
worth’s most important work was finished, Al¬ 
fred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Eliza¬ 
beth Barrett had made their first appearances 
in print, Matthew Arnold was at school, Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina were 
children, William Morris and Algernon Charles 
Swinburne had just been born. Walter Savage 
Landor, one of the strangest figures in our 
poetical literature, whose first poems had been 
published in 1795, was still at the prime of his 
genius, but the small body of his best work 
does not mark him very definitely as either 
Romantic or Victorian. There were a number 
of less famous but by no means inconsiderable 
[ 22 ] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 


poets whose work will call for notice as we pro¬ 
ceed. 

The Romantic Revival in English poetry is 
generally accepted as having Blake and Gray 
and Collins for its pioneers. It must, however, 
be remembered that the earlier part of the 
eighteenth century, the age of reason, had not 
been wholly without the Romantic note. To 
read the work of the almost forgotten smaller 
men of that time is to chance often upon a 
phrase in which the tenderness, and heart-ache, 
and the warm sense of colour and natural 
beauty, which were so to dominate the great 
epoch from Wordsworth to Keats, break 
through the witty and balanced argument of 
an age when it was not considered to be the 
thing to say too much about the heart. Even 
the master, Pope himself, in some of his pas¬ 
torals and elegies, and in such a poem as Eloisa 
to Abelard , sometimes lets the glow of passion 
play upon a poetic habit that was not used to 
have its cold and logical brilliance ruffled ex¬ 
cept by anger. In those days, however, the: 
Romantic note when it was struck seems rather 
to have been struck by accident than by de- 

[23] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


liberation, while in Gray and Collins there is 
continually an instinct for it, in conflict with 
an inherited tradition that gives it no encour¬ 
agement. Blake, although he definitely helped 
the Romantic Revival on its way, was himself, 
like Landor, rather an isolated manifestation 
of poetry belonging not very clearly to any 
particular age. The Romantic Revival, when 
it did come, came with a full force of reaction 
against the age of reason, with its often ad¬ 
mirable rhetoric, its emotional timidity and its 
concern with etiquette at the expense of char¬ 
acter. But the Romantic Revival, for all the 
splendour of its common spirit and the great 
personal genius of its masters, had one radical 
condition of weakness, namely, that it was a 
revival. In many ways it was, and remains, 
the richest period in English poetry, but it was 
also the first period in English poetry that had 
something in the inspiration of its actual poetic 
method that was second-hand and not original. 
This is not to say that Wordsworth and the 
others were not original poets. The discovery 
of nature, the revolutionary passion, the pre¬ 
occupation with the everyday life of the emo- 

[24] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 

tions, one or another of these marked Keats 
and Shelley and Byron, and the rest of them, 
as discoverers. But in the actual machinery 
through which their poetic mood worked there 
was often something literary and remembered 
in a sense more marked than can be observed 
in the practice of poets in England before. It 
is true that no good poet has ever worked 
without some example in his mind, but the 
Elizabethans were conscious of an Italian in¬ 
fluence as of something vivid and present 
among them, a very part of their own lives, 
as it were, whereas the Elizabethan influence 
upon Keats was something deliberately remem¬ 
bered, something won back from a long past 
age. Without in the least detracting from the 
achievement of Keats, which must remain 
among the greatest in English poetry, it may 
be said that in this respect the Elizabethans 
were Italians but that Keats imitated the Eliz¬ 
abethans. The poets of the Romantic Revival 
were as rich in creative endowment as the 
Elizabethans themselves, certainly richer than 
the Augustans. But, in a sense, even the pol¬ 
ished formality of Pope’s verse and the artifi- 

[25] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


ciality of his manner were more exactly his 
own than were the free music and luxurious 
emotional life the unaided discoveries of the 
Romantics who used them in the next age. 

This circumstance of the Romantic Revival 
has had a profound influence upon English 
poetry ever since, and so far as may be proph¬ 
esied it is likely to continue to do so. Poetry 
since the death of Keats and Shelley and Byron 
has acquired many new interests, chiefly intel¬ 
lectual interests, which did not belong to it be¬ 
fore their time, or, at least, did not belong to 
it in anything like the same measure, but it 
has, also, become definitely a less original thing 
both as to manner and in its emotional content. 
Whether this is a gain or loss is for each reader 
to determine for himself, but in the conclusion 
it is likely that there would be at least as many 
people glad of the fact as sorry for it. I must 
elaborate this position first as to the manner, 
and later as to the content. 

I would be dogmatic at once and say that in 
spite of all the experimenters in vers libre and 
polyphonic prose and what not, there is now no 
new verse form to be discovered in English. 

[ 26 ] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 

Every poet as he comes along can invent new 
combinations of existing forms, often enchant- 
ingly, but that is another matter, though even 
this becomes increasingly difficult. Poetry will 
never take kindly to free verse as a common 
method, though any poet is likely to practise 
it at intervals. So-called polyphonic prose, 
which is only a variety of free verse, may lend 
itself often to admirable writing when it hap¬ 
pens to be used by an admirable writer, but for 
most of us it is incapable of the peculiar delight 
given by regular verse forms which have been 
evolved through centuries of experience. The 
introduction of classical metres into English 
poetry is a lost cause, as it always has been, at¬ 
tractive though it may be to a fine spirit now 
and again. There remains for the use of the 
poets the vast technique of recognised verse 
form with its infinite variety of line length and 
stanzaic structure. None of the considerable 
poets in our literature has ever found it irk¬ 
some to work within these limitations, an ob¬ 
servation which is as just to-day as it ever was. 
Since the Romantic poets' the possibilities of 
line and stanza in themselves have hardly been 
[27] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


extended in any important manner, unless we 
allow to the contrary, for example, Swinburne’s 
exploitation of anapaestic measures, which, 
on the whole, was to the bad rather than to 
the good in spite of its occasional triumphs. 
Strictly speaking, as to line and stanza in them¬ 
selves, it might be said that even the Romantics 
did nothing that could not be matched some¬ 
where or another in English poetry before them. 
Their technical invention was mostly rediscov¬ 
ery, though none the less creditable to them 
for that. Their rediscovery was of something 
so forgotten that they might claim that it was 
new, but, however that may be, there has been 
nothing new since them in the strictly formal 
contour of English verse. What has been new, 
and what must always be new when a true poet 
is at work, is the rhythmic beat within that 
contour, and the genius of our language is hap¬ 
pily such as to give this beat boundless free¬ 
dom. Among our contemporaries no one has 
achieved a technique more distinctively his 
own, perhaps, than Mr. Walter de la Mare, but 
upon examination it will be found that this 
[ 28 ] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 

distinctiveness is entirely one of his rhythmic 
beat, and that there is no invention of metrical 
form. 

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller, 
Knocking on the moonlit door; 

is peculiarly marked by Mr. de la Mare’s 
rhythmic genius; but alter the beat a little and 
you get— 

And they changed their lives and departed, and came 
back as the leaves of the trees. 

And again, to go back beyond Morris, we come 
even to— 

What are the wild waves saying, 

Sister, the whole day long. 

Leaving out the question of the stanzaic 
form and line lengths, and the way these are 
set out on the printed page, there is in these 
three examples an almost exact stress-equiva¬ 
lence, but each has its own entirely individual 
rhythmic life; rather commonplace and obvious 
in the last of the three, deep-lunged and heroic 

[29] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


in Morris, and very delicate and subtle in Mr. 
de la Mare. 

It is true that now and again a poet even 
to-day may contrive charming variations upon 
stanzaic form, as Tennyson did in his Recol¬ 
lections of the Arabian Nights , or as Mr. 
Thomas Hardy has done more recently in many 
of his lyrics. Every now and again also a poet 
may invent some attractive little device of his 
own in the smaller things of technique, as, for 
example, Mr. Frank Kendon, a new poet who 
makes an interesting experiment with rhyme- 
sounds thus—musing, mind, attuned, despis¬ 
ing. But there is no particular virtue in these 
gestures once their novelty has passed, and the 
fact remains that from the coming of Words¬ 
worth until all our best contemporary poets, by 
far the greater part of the most original work, 
and important work, has been done in recog¬ 
nised verse forms, and it has relied for its per¬ 
sonal accent upon an individual rhythmic beat 
within those forms. The domination of the 
rhymed heroic couplet in the age preceding 
Wordsworth was so complete as to make the 
return to other more definitely lyric meas- 
[30] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 


ures almost a feat of invention, but, even so, 
it is doubtful whether there is any verse form 
used by Wordsworth or Blake or Shelley or 
Keats, or any of their contemporaries, which 
could not in its essential character be matched 
somewhere in the sixteenth or seventeenth cen¬ 
turies. 

In its structural foundations, therefore, Vic¬ 
torian verse in England may be said to be a 
direct inheritance from the Romantic age, and 
through it from the longer general ancestry of 
English poetry. The body of fine work done 
between Victoria’s succession and the death of 
Tennyson is sufficient proof that the poetic in¬ 
stinct of the race knew very well what it was 
about in this. At the same time, the more 
restless talents were sometimes troubled by alle¬ 
giance to forms that, whatever their virtue, had 
no longer the first flush of inventive delight. 
The sombre, charnel-house genius of a Webster, 
the rugged, almost fierce, intellectual power of 
a Ben Jonson, the religious ecstasy of a 
Vaughan, the tender irresponsibility of a Love¬ 
lace or a Suckling, and the spiritual ingenuity 
of a Donne, were all alike content to work in 

[ 31 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


the simplest lyric forms, and were able to find 
complete expression through these, because as 
forms they were still fresh enough to be for 
each man treasure-trove. Nowhere in the 
whole range of passion and wit and subtle 
argument was there a mood to be found that 
wanted at any time to break the mould. To a 
large extent this has remained true until our 
own day, but as time has gone on a poet has 
now and again suddenly, as it were, become 
too conscious of the long service already done 
by the more established measures and has been 
tempted into irregularities which have some¬ 
times been admirable in result and have some¬ 
times tumbled over into excesses only to be 
forgotten. A great deal of Browning’s verse 
is the result of some such uneasiness in his 
mind, a fear lest he should accept tradition too 
easily, a deliberate realisation on his part that 
a poet has to be original. Browning’s genius 
could stand the strain, but a strain it was. 
Matthew Arnold’s experiments in free verse 
have much the same origin. He, again, justi¬ 
fied himself, but without doing anything to 
show that the main traditions in which he 
[32] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 


worked habitually were becoming less impor¬ 
tant to English poetry. In the case of Whit¬ 
man, the one example in the Victorian age of 
a great poetic genius working consistently with¬ 
out respect for the established practice of Eng¬ 
lish verse, there is no doubt that to minds and 
ears aware of all that custom has achieved, a 
great energy denied itself more than half its 
effect. 

Whitman’s revolt was complete, and, broad¬ 
ly speaking, it has had no effect upon English 
poetry. Arnold’s departures from established 
practice were occasional and, even so, pretty 
much in the example of Milton, who himself 
made but few experiments, and those not vio¬ 
lent departures from the establishment. Brown¬ 
ing’s nonconformity was another matter. Un¬ 
like Whitman, he remained essentially always 
within the tradition, but his unrest within the 
tradition was more or less constant and not, 
as with Arnold, the accident of a mood here 
and there. Browning’s was the most important 
poetic revolt of his age, and it is a revolt that 
is a matter of diction more precisely than of 
metrical form. And in its manner, as distin- 

[ 33 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


guished from its content, it is in diction that the 
Victorian age most importantly modified tra¬ 
dition. Leaving Whitman out of the question, 
the Victorian use of verse was, as we have seen, 
with one or two insignificant exceptions, an 
acknowledgment of the fitness of all that had 
been done by the age-long instinct of the race. 
Nor, taking the Victorian achievement as a 
whole, shall we find any violent or general 
change in the management of diction itself. 
But practice here was to some extent modified, 
and chiefly by Browning and through his in¬ 
fluence. 

The history of diction in English poetry is 
one that has never been written, and one that 
would need a great volume of argument and 
illustration. But taking a summary view of 
the whole field certain characteristics define 
themselves from age to age. The first gen¬ 
eralisation that may be made about good dic¬ 
tion in poetry is that it should derive from the 
common speech of the time and yet be a height¬ 
ened idiomatic form of that speech, achieving 
from the emotional pressure of poetry a new 
dignity and beauty. And we shall find that in 

[ 34 ] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 


English poetry the diction has always associated 
itself in this way with the natural speech of the 
time. Chaucer, in taking English speech, and 
for the first time making it the language of 
English literature, was dealing, so far as we can 
reconstruct the facts of that far-off time, with 
a language unsophisticated, unlearned, and 
quite ingenuous in its sincerity. And the lan¬ 
guage of his poetry is marked by these qualities, 
quickened by the breath of the poet’s genius. 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote 

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote. 

And bathed every veyne in swich licour, 

Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth 
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, 

And smale fowle maken melodye, 

That slepen al the night with open ye, 

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages) : 

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages. . . . 


Nothing could be simpler in the most literal 
sense than the wording of this passage. It is 
not the simplicity used by great genius to en¬ 
force some tragic or tender crisis, but the sim- 

[ 35 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


plicity of a man who wants to make an entirely 
matter-of-fact statement, but to make it with 
dignity and authority. It is not likely that the 
people of Chaucer’s time talked exactly like 
that, but it is certain that almost any of them 
would understand what Chaucer was saying 
without the smallest difficulty. And we 
imagine that his clarity of statement was, in 
fact, the chief idiomatic characteristic of the 
common speech of the time, and that Chaucer 
was, in diction, definitely the poet of his age in 
realising this. To read this opening of The 
Canterbury Tales over three or four times is 
to be struck more and more by the remarkable 
purity of the diction, and it may be said of 
Chaucer’s work as a whole that the chief 
triumph of his dealing with language was that 
he took the simplicity which was common 
around him and transfigured it into that finer 
essence of simplicity which is purity. When 
two hundred years after Chaucer’s death the 
great Elizabethans were in full song, much in 
the meantime had happened to common Eng¬ 
lish. It had become instructed, more flexible 
in its intellectual play, richer in association, 
[36] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 


and rather more conscious of its own capacities. 
At the same time it was now the instrument of 
a people fired with ardent enthusiasm, rich in 
enterprise, and glowing with the vitality of a 
young and prospering national spirit. It was 
the speech of witty, passionate, and powerful 
youth, and triumphant youth, delighting in 
problems both of body and mind, immensely 
fertile in its resources. But it had not yet be¬ 
come sophisticated, and that is the great bond 
between it and the speech of Chaucer’s time, 
and the great difference between it and the 
speech of later ages. And, again, these charac¬ 
teristics which we suppose with good reason to 
have been those of everyday speech are to be 
found completely explored and enriched in the 
age’s poetry. And one of Shakespeare’s son¬ 
nets may stand in witness of what was within 
the common practice of the poets of the age. 


But wherefore do not you a mightier waie 
Make warre vppon this bloudie tirant time ? 

And fortifie your selfe in your decay 

With meanes more blessed then my barren rime? 

Now stand you on the top of happie houres, 

And many maiden gardens, yet vnset, 

[ 37 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


With vertuous wish would beare your liuing flowers, 
Much liker than your painted counterfeit : 

So should the lines of life that life repaire 
Which this (Time’s pensel or my pupill pen) 

Neither in inward worth nor outward faire 
Can make you liue your selfe in eies of men, 

To giue away your selfe, keeps your selfe still, 

And you must liue drawne by your owne sweet skill. 

In the succeeding age, from the Elizabethans 
to the Augustans, the same principle may be 
discovered in the practice of poets as different 
in their personal quality as, say, Donne, Milton 
and Lovelace. Donne’s— 

By Absence this good means I gain 
That I can catch her 
Where none can watch her, 

In some close corner of my brain: 

There I embrace and kiss her 

And so enjoy her and none miss her . . . 

may have perplexed his readers by its intellect 
tual turn, but it cannot have seemed anything 
but easily natural to them in its actual word. 
If Donne was startling, it was in what he said 
and not at all in his way of saying it. And so 
with Milton. Cotamon speech could never 
[ 38 ] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 

put on a sublimer transfiguration than in such 
passages as— 

Weep no more, woful Shepherds, weep no more, 
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, 

Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar, 

So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, 

And yet anon repairs his drooping head, 

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore 
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky. . . . 

But it remains the common speech that is being 
so dignified. Milton’s diction, more eminently 
poetical perhaps than any other in the language, 
is still founded on the grave, full-syllabled 
Biblical idiom that we are sure was current in 
the ordinary enlightened speech of the time. 
The first readers of his poems would find a 
familiar tongue, however unsuspected was the 
beauty that it revealed to them. And in the 
lighter lyrists of that age, this relation of poetic 
to common speech, secured without any appar¬ 
ent deliberation—we may indeed say definitely 
without it—and yet achieving the magic with 
easy certainty, shines round us on every hand. 

Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind 
That from the nunnery 

[39] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind 
To war and arms I fly . . . 


and— 

Shut not so soon; the dull-eyed night 
Has not as yet begun 
To make a seizure on the light, 

Or to seal up the sun . . . 

and— 

Out upon it! I have lov’d 
Three whole days together; 

And am like to love three more, 

If it prove fair weather . . . 

are all alike loyal both to poetry and to the 
common English of their time. Nor do the 
lyrists whose raptures were less of the world 
go elsewhere for their means of expression. 
Vaughan, with— 

Happy those early days, when I 
Shined in my Angel-infancy! 

Before I understood this place 
Appointed for my second race, 

Or taught my soul to fancy aught 
But a white, celestial thought. . . . 

[ 40 ] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 

and Herbert with— 

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, 

The bridal of the earth and sky— 

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night 
For thou must die. . . . 

and Crashaw with— 

Since ’tis not to be had at home 
She’ll travel for a martyrdom. . . . 

follow the same poetic instinct precisely. 

When we pass into a world of new artistic 
aim, the world of which Alexander Pope is 
president, we find the same thing happening. 
The worldly pilgrims of Chaucer's book, Eliza¬ 
beth's intrepid adventures, the saintly learning 
and gestured gallantry that fought it out in 
Puritan England, have in turn passed from the 
centre of the stage of articulate national life, 
to make way for the man about town, the phil¬ 
anderer, the coquette, and the sententious 
moralist. The innuendo and the moral precept 
are together on every man's lips, not wholly 
insincere in their partnership. And the idiom 
of this witty, argumentative, intriguing and 

[ 41 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


rather self-righteous society is perfectly turned 
to the use of genius in the Popean poetry. 
When The Dunciad and The Essay on Man 
and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot were first 
read, the coffee-houses and boudoirs may have 
been moved by every varying degree of delight 
and resentment, but nobody questioned that 
here was the common language and that at the 
same time it was being used above the common 
pitch. Pastoral, invective, worldly-wisdom, 
religious philosophising, the same instrument 
was there exactly tempered for each alike, 
thus— 

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, 

Whose flocks supply him with attire; 

Whose trees in summer yield him shade, 

In winter fire. 


and— 

One dedicates in high heroic prose, 

And ridicules beyond a hundred foes: 

One from all Grub Street will my fame defend, 
And, more abusive, calls himself my friend. 

This prints my letters, that expects a bribe, 

And others roar aloud, “Subscribe, subscribe!” . . . 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 


and— 

A litde learning is a dangerous thing, 

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring . • . 


and— 

All nature is but art unknown to thee, 

All chance, direction which thou canst not see; 
All discord, harmony not understood; 

All partial evil, universal good; 

And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, 

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. 

It is true that the Augustan school in its de¬ 
cline, which was contemporary with the faint 
prelude of the Romantic Revival, fell into an 
extreme artificiality of diction that can hardly 
have had its model even by suggestion in the 
common speech of the time. So good a poet 
as Gray, who was himself one of the preludists, 
was not blameless in this respect, and could 
write— 


Him the dog of darkness spied, 

His shaggy throat he open’d wide, 
While from his jaws, with carnage fill’d, 
Foam and human gore distill’d: 

[ 43 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Hoarse he bays with hideous din, 

Eyes that glow, and fangs that grin; 

And long pursues, with fruitless yell, 

The father of the powerful spell . . . 

which Collins, at his best even surer than Gray 
in prophecy of a new age, could match with— 

Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air, 

Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare: 

On whom that ravening brood of Fate, 

Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait: 

Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see, 

And look not madly wild, like thee? 

These excesses were, however, at no time 
characteristic of the better poets of the time, 
and were rather the mumbo-jumbo of versifiers 
who, lacking any personal inspiration, caught a 
rumour at second or even third hand of a 
spurious Arcadia, and rhymed it—or blank- 
versed it—into a spiritless rhetoric. It is only 
suggestive at a very distant cry, and by the 
merest implication, of the true nature of Augus¬ 
tan poetry that Richard Jago could write— 

And oft the stately Tow’rs, that overtop 
The rising Wood, and oft the broken Arch, 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 

Or mould’ring Wall, well taught to counterfeit 
The Waste of Time, to solemn Thought excite, 
And crown with graceful Pomp the shaggy Hill. 

No age of English poetry has suffered more 
in reputation through the malpractices of its 
more undistinguished writers than that of Pope, 
and in all its finer expression it worked its own 
way as closely in touch as any other with the 
ordinary speech of its own time. 

In these references to common speech, the 
standard referred to, it may be said, is the 
speech of the intelligent and vivid, though not 
necessarily the most highly educated, members 
of the community. There is no telling at any 
time where exactly you are going to catch the 
true turn of racy or imaginative idiom, and it 
is as unsafe to generalize in favour of the rustic 
as it is to do so in favour of the tutored towns¬ 
man. Good minds make good speech, and 
cumulatively they give the common diction of 
an age a character which cannot escape the 
poets when poetry has any health in it, which, 
to do it justice in looking back over five hun¬ 
dred years of achievement, is nearly always. 
Apart from those lapses of quite unrepresenta- 

[ 45 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 

tive poets, the relation which is being discussed 
was preserved, as we have seen, with unbroken 
continuity from the beginnings down to the 
time of the late Augustans, the immediate pre¬ 
decessors of Wordsworth. 

While, however, the poetasters of the Po- 
pean descent 1 are now seen clearly enough to 
have fallen far short of the poetic stature of 
their time, they were widely read and admired, 
and in 1798, when Wordsworth prefaced the 
Lyrical Ballads with the now famous but then 
slightly noted challenge to a false poetic dic¬ 
tion, their example seemed no doubt to be a 
more dangerous influence than was in fact the 
case. If Wordsworth’s protest had never been 
explicitly made, we should have lost a master¬ 
piece of critical prose, but English poetry 
would none the less surely have remained loyal 
to the principle that Wordsworth so earnestly 
advocated. The big men had never lost sight 
of it, nor were they in any general sense likely 

1 The sifting of the minor poetic writers of the eighteenth 
century is a task to which critical attention is now being 
very profitably turned. Many readers of poetry no doubt 
associate Richard Jago and Matthew Green, for example, 
in their minds as belonging to the same negligible group, 
whereas Jago was a poor dull fellow in verse and Green a 
very considerable poet indeed. 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 


to. In attacking the windy pomposity that for 
a time stole poetic honours, with a power that 
flattered its importance, Wordsworth did not 
recognise that, among the more considerable 
poets, even those who were demonstrably 
touched by the falsity of style prevalent among 
their inferiors were at the same time preparing 
the reform of which he himself was the new 
and conscious gospeller. Gray who, as has been 
shown, could belabour his muse with any of 
them, and who was named by Wordsworth as 
a particular example for censure, did also write 
the Elegy , in which whatever lapses there may 
be are far more than atoned for in the main 
movement by the very purity of style which was 
the aim of Wordsworth’s pleading. Words¬ 
worth’s cause was a just one, but it was also 
one that was obvious to the genius of English 
poetry, and the fact that he was as consciously 
preoccupied with it as he was is not without its 
reflection in his own creative work. He was 
sometimes ridden by his theory, and then the 
lovely simplicity that was the basis of a style 
that is at the height of English poetry lopped 
over into mere banality. But in his normal 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


manner Wordsworth exemplified his critical 
position with complete success, and nowhere 
more strikingly than in his most inspired pas¬ 
sages. The spoken English with which his 
creative mood was familiar must have been a 
blend drawn from the serious intellectualism 
of young literary society, the forthright simpli¬ 
cities of the northern dalesmen, where an old 
Biblical tradition coloured a natural austerity, 
with touches of paternal authority and under¬ 
graduate levity—or perhaps a little less than 
levity. It was the speech of a new England, 
sophisticated, politically self-conscious, rather 
heavily dialectical, but it was saved by the 
Bible, the dalesman, and a community of wit. 
It was such a speech, played upon by that 
knowledge of the poet’s literary ancestry which 
is a necessary agent always in the transmuta¬ 
tion, that Wordsworth subdued exactly to his 
imaginative purposes. 

Will no one tell me what she sings? 

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
For old, unhappy, far-off things, 

And battles long ago: 

[48] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 

Or is it some more humble lay, 

Familiar matter of to-day? 

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, 

That has been, and may be again! 

Wordsworth’s great contemporaries, each in 
his own way, in terms of his own temperament, 
were guided by the same principle. The 
whole nature of Burns’s genius was governed 
by his will to sing the common speech of Scot¬ 
land into immortality. The beau monde , the 
gaming rooms and the prize-ring, the purlieus 
of scandal and the solitudes of romantic exile 
filled with the whispers of poetry and heroic 
history, the world of new loves and lost causes, 
of literary loyalties and animosities, among 
which Byron moved indifferently, in or out of 
temper, all spoke their own language in the 
motley of his verse. To know the poet and 
his environment is to see the same essential 
man in— 

Smart uniforms and sparkling coronets 

Are spurned in turn, until her turn arrives, 

After male loss of time, and hearts, and bets 
Upon the sweepstakes for substantial wives; 

[ 49 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


And when at last the pretty creature gets 

Some gentleman, who fights, or writes, or drives, 
It soothes the awkward squad of the rejected 
To find how very badly she selected . . . 


and in— 

The mountains look on Marathon— 

And Marathon looks on the sea; 

And musing there an hour alone, 

I dreamed that Greece might still be free; 

For standing on the Persians’ grave, 

I could not deem myself a slave. 

Even Shelley, or that mood in him that was. 
preoccupied with the fiery pinnacles in the 
clouds, kept the diction of his most ethereal 
flights in tune with the same instinctive neces¬ 
sity. 

The glory of her being, issuing thence, 

Stains the dead, blank, cold air, with a warm shade 
Of unentangled intermixture, made 
By Love, of light and motion: one intense 
Diffusion, one serene Omnipresence, 

Whose flowing outlines mingle in their flowing, 
Around her cheeks and utmost fingers glowing 
With the unintermitted blood, which there 
■Quivers (as in a fleece of snow-like air 
The crimson pulse of living morning quiver). 

[ 50 ] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 

Continuously prolonged, and ending never, 

Till they are lost, and in that Beauty furled 
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world; 
Scarce visible from extreme loveliness . . . 

may perhaps at first glance be elusive in its 
precise meaning, but it is not because of any¬ 
thing difficult or uncommon in the actual 
words, but because the poet’s mind is engaged 
with an almost indefinable emotion. Keats 
again, for all the emphasis of a clear literary 
influence upon his diction, was never anything 
but easily intelligible in his actual statement 
to the simplest reader. The Eve of St. Agnes 
and Isabella , even the odes, might have come 
out a little differently if there had been no 
Spenser or Marlowe or Chapman, but the reader 
of 1820 had no need to be a scholar of Eliza¬ 
bethan poetry to perceive every shade of their 
beauty as they were. Alone among the great 
poets of his time, Coleridge at intervals sound¬ 
ed tones in his verse that were archaic, or 
purely fanciful rather, not recognisably out of 
the English of daily use. 

He holds him with his skinny hand, 

“There was a ship,” quoth he. 

[5i] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


“Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!” 

Eftsoons his hand dropt he. 

Coming upon that at the opening of The 
Ancient Mariner , the first readers of Lyrical 
Ballads must have been conscious that some¬ 
thing a little odd was here being done with 
language. But such things are incidents merely 
even in Coleridge’s style, and need not be 
stressed. In any case they were, it may be, 
done more than half humorously, and for the 
most part Coleridge—in the work of his that 
matters—was as sure as Wordsworth himself 
in the purity of his diction, in drawing it from 
the one wholesome source. 

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, 

Whether the summer clothe the general earth 
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 
Of mossy apple-tree, while the high thatch 
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall 
Heard only in the trances of the blast, 

Or, if the secret ministry of frost 
Shall hang them up in silent icicles, 

Quietly shining to the quiet moon. 


Beside which may be set, as a final example 

[ 52 ] 


DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 


from that age of what poetry can do in the way 
of transfiguring plain speech, Landor’s— 

Stand close around, ye Stygian set, 

With Dirce in one boat convey’d! 

Or Charon, seeing, may forget 
That he is old and she a shade. 


[ 53 ] 


Chapter III 

The Problems of the Victorians 

B Y the time the Victorian masters were be¬ 
ginning to write, the English language, in 
the common use of it, had thus gone through 
many adventures. Shaping itself to the typical 
or representative national temper and aspira¬ 
tions from one age to another, it had been domi¬ 
nantly in succession naif, lusty, sacramental, 
witty and didactic, high-flown in its excesses, 
and then learned and argumentative with a 
leaven of yeoman correction in it under Words¬ 
worth’s control. These characteristics had in 
turn passed into the texture of English poetry, 
and each had left something of its mark upon 
the future practice of the art, complicating it 
and making it more and more subject to a con¬ 
scious literary deliberation. And now the exam¬ 
ple of Byron, with his cosmopolitan and some¬ 
times journalistic use of language, of Keats with 

[54] 


THE PROBLEMS OF THE VICTORIANS 


his intense brooding upon and requickening of 
an antique mode, of Shelley with his almost 
fanatical demands upon the spiritual resources 
of words, had further extended the range of 
poetic diction and at the same time increased 
the difficulties in the way of original mastery. 
These problems may seem to be artificial as 
here stated, and in a sense they are so. Poetry 
is neither more nor less difficult at one time 
than another, given the poet. But in the light 
of achievement we may not unprofitably con¬ 
sider what are the conditions that have gov¬ 
erned that achievement from age to age, and so 
perhaps at least correct some of the false and 
easy notions that we are apt to foster about the 
art of our own time, when we approach it unset 
in its right historical perspective. Tennyson 
and Browning and Arnold and the Rossettis 
and Morris and Swinburne give us the delight 
of experience perfectly expressed, and that is 
the first, and in a way the last, thing to be 
said about them as poets. But, coming when 
they did, they were confronted with special 
problems in the practice of their art, and we 
lose nothing of our enjoyment of their essential 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


poetry in understanding what those problems 
were. 

English poetry was now nearly five hundred 
years old. In its creation immense demands 
had been made upon the language, and many 
characteristic beauties of poetic style might 
well have been supposed to have been now ex¬ 
plored beyond further possibilities. When 
Chaucer wrote, the inspiration as of divinely 
wise and happy childhood could shine through 
the most ingenuous of phrases, and the plainest 
statement was touched by magic for ever in this 
playground of poetry’s infancy. “O yonge 
fresshe folkes,” he exclaims, or “Now shippes 
sailinge in the sea,” or “A nightingale, upon a 
cedre grene,” or “Ther sprang the violete all 
newe,” and we have with every word the en¬ 
chanted discovery of poetry. Thereafter a 
poet might score a great effect now and again 
by placing some such utter simplicity in the 
midst of subtler or more elaborate statement, 
but it could hardly again be used as a cus¬ 
tomary manner. What was then and has ever 
since remained triumphantly original in Chau¬ 
cer could but become commonplace on repeti- 

[56] 


THE PROBLEMS OF THE VICTORIANS 

tion. His way of saying delightedly that the 
flowers were fresh and the birds were glad and 
that apples were sweet, and saying these things 
just as simply as that, stands beside his humor¬ 
ous invention of character as one of the two 
chief glories of his poetry, but it was not a case 
of his faintly suggesting a poetic possibility 
that could be elaborated by his successors. He 
took the obvious and without embroidering it 
with a single word made it into poetry of ever¬ 
lasting freshness, but he did this once and for 
all, and poets after him would have to add 
some touch of revelation of their own before 
they could make good their claim. Chaucer 
could say that flowers were fresh and leave it 
at that, giving us a perfect image of spring, 
but even two hundred years later, in what now 
seems to us to have been still the dawn of 
English poetry, Shakespeare had to make his 
impression with a far more complex image— 

daffodils, 

That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty. 


By the time that Tennyson began to write, 

[57] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Shakespeare’s necessity was even plainer. The 
thousand simple circumstances of nature and 
humanity were still an inevitable part of the 
poet’s content matter. In the course of a life- 
work of artistic creation he could not but want 
to say a dozen times that the grass was green 
and the sky blue, the water clear and love un¬ 
certain, and it is merely pointless to forbid 
him these things because they have been said 
before. But apart from that allowance of an 
occasional cliche , admitted because of some 
virtue as contrast, as for example when Tenny¬ 
son says— 

On one side lay the ocean, and on one 

Lay a great water, and the moon was full . . . 

he had to say these things with just as much 
originality of phrase as would compel atten¬ 
tion, and yet with not one word beyond this, 
or one word too heavily weighted, lest he 
should be accused of inflation, which is the 
death of poetry. 

A second difficulty that Tennyson, to use the 
one example for the moment, had to meet was 
in connection with the associative value of 

[ 58 ] 


THE PROBLEMS OF THE VICTORIANS 

words. When Chaucer was writing, words can 
have had little or no associative value. 1 
Even with Shakespeare they must have had 
far less of this evocative power than they had 
three hundred years later. Indeed, Shake¬ 
speare’s own language has unquestionably for 
us acquired a certain patina from time. We 
read to-day— 

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, 

and upon analysis we are aware of two separate 
sources of our delight in the superbly used 
word “sessions.” Firstly, there is its purely 
imaginative value. For Shakespeare, “ses¬ 
sions” can have had but one literal meaning. 
In the framing of that line the common marvel 
of creative imagination was performed. The 
poet deliberated upon his thoughts gathering 
together for the survey of “things past.” It was 
a process something formal and ceremonious 
that he had in mind, a solemn conclave. Thus 
the ritual of the law would suggest itself to him, 
the ordered gravity of a court, the pregnant 

1 That is to say, Chaucer’s language as intelligible to us. 
Lost in it, no doubt, are associations from earlier speech. 

[59] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


occasion of a sessions. And thereupon the two 
ideas would associate themselves, the perfect 
image would be created, and with it would 
come the full exercise of our imaginative 
powers in turn, of our best delight in poetry. 
For the bare actual setting of the scene in his 
sonnet Shakespeare might have been content 
with some such line as— 

When to my mind I summon up things past, 

but the informing vitality would have escaped. 
It is one of the mysteries of poetry that when 
you translate her word into another, although 
by logic it may seem to be the same thing, it 
is in truth something essentially different. It 
is not quite a barren truism to say that you can 
only say what Shakespeare said by saying what 
he said— 

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 

I summon up remembrance of things past. 

This, then, is the first value that we discover in 
Shakespeare's use in that connection of the 
word “sessions”—an exact functioning of the 
[ 60 ] 


THE PROBLEMS OF THE VICTORIANS 

poetic imagination. But over and above that 
there is yet another value, one that is not very 
easy to define in set terms, and one of which 
Shakespeare himself can hardly have been con¬ 
sciously aware. “Sessions,” as we now read 
the word, calls to our mind, as it did to his, a 
court of law with all its weighty circum¬ 
stance; also, as we read it in the sonnet, we get 
precisely the effect of pure imaginative effort 
that Shakespeare got, or as much of it as is 
possible to our own faculty; but the word has 
also taken on a strange atmospheric signifi¬ 
cance, almost a shade of actual meaning that 
is beyond its original intention. In its strictly 
imaginative value alone, the word was one that 
might without offence have been more or less 
similarly used by one of Shakespeare’s con¬ 
temporaries or early successors, even after his 
brilliant discovery of it in that context. Shake¬ 
speare’s choice of the word was entirely admir¬ 
able for his imaginative purpose, but it was 
not so astonishing as to make it explicitly his 
own beyond the use of any other poet who 
wished to escape the charge of mere theft. But 
as time went on, the word, fixed there in its 
[ 61 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


sonnet, underwent a spiritual evolution, that 
for practical purposes was complete in any case 
by the time Tennyson arrived, until it was in 
some sense of a newly acquired nature, and no 
longer safe for any poet’s handling. The word 
could not now be used in anything approaching 
the same context without calling up in the 
reader’s mind the whole dark and passionate 
background of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It has, 
in short, acquired a specifically literary associa¬ 
tion which is to say—although some critics 
would seem to overlook the fact—that it is the 
living witness of, one of the supreme moments 
of human experience, but also that it has be¬ 
come so essential a part of that particular mo¬ 
ment that it is now almost impossible to use it 
in the service of any other. And when Tenny¬ 
son began to write he found a language that 
was strewn with words that had put on this 
dangerous nature, beautiful and often as it 
would appear irreplaceable words, yet now 
with calamity in their touch for the poet. To 
reject them was by no means the same thing as 
rejecting the false “poetic” inflation that had 
been the mark of Wordsworth’s attack. It 


THE PROBLEMS OF THE VICTORIANS 


meant that by now a new discipline of a very 
arduous and vigilant kind had become neces¬ 
sary in the practice of poetry. On every hand 
were admirable and seductive instruments the 
use of which was forbidden. If you were Keats 
you might privateer among the old poetry with 
profit, but his success in this matter was the 
adventure of lucky genius, not an example to 
be followed. Shakespeare could write 

Not poppy nor mandragora 
Nor all the drowsy syrups of this world . . . 

and Keats could find his Autumn sleeping 

Drowsed with the fume of poppies . . . 

and be justified of his borrowing, but the exile 
from poetry of “drowsing’ 5 and “poppies” 
in company, which had at least been suggested 
by Shakespeare’s lines, was now in any case 
absolute. So that the poet’s craft is already 
complicated in two ways. If Tennyson in his 
verse wanted to recall the birds in spring, he 
could no longer rely for his effect upon some 
simple statement such as “the happy birds sang 
[63] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


on the bough,” and further, in his elaborated 
image he had studiously to keep clear, for 
example, of 

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang— 

although the chances were that this superb and 
complex image would be insinuatingly persist¬ 
ent in his mind. 

But these were not the only difficulties to be 
met in the management of diction. I have re¬ 
ferred to Byron’s occasional “journalistic use 
of language.” Every now and again some one 
raises a false issue as between journalism and 
literature, suggesting that literature is arro¬ 
gant in looking upon journalism as being less 
exalted than itself. It is the same kind of silly 
baiting as is sometimes indulged in between 
actors and dramatists, when it is indignantly 
suggested that it is an affront to the admirable 
art of Burbage to hold that it is, if the com¬ 
parison must be made, on a lower creative plane 
than that of Shakespeare. Journalism, decent¬ 
ly practised, can be as honourable and useful 
a profession as any other, and one to show 

[64] 


THE PROBLEMS OF THE VICTORIANS 


natural gifts of taste and presentation to great 
advantage. But journalism is not literature, 
nor are its aims or methods those of literature. 
That literature often appears in the journals 
is beside the point. The essential condition of 
journalism is that it seeks either to report a 
fact or an event in terms that shall be imme¬ 
diately intelligible to the great mass of people, 
or to reflect an opinion from that mass in 
equally intelligible terms for the satisfaction 
of the individual units that make up that mass. 
Its business particularly is to accept and to re¬ 
port, and when it uses invention—which it 
must be allowed it often does—it is always in¬ 
vention of the wrong kind. To literature, on 
the other hand, fact and event mean nothing 
until they are related to an idea, or are 
seen in conjunction with character, or found to 
be useful for illuminating the experience of a 
particular temperament, and further, in pre¬ 
cise contrast to journalism, literature seeks to 
reflect an individual opinion for the benefit or 
pleasure of the mass so far as the mass cares to 
take any notice of it. Thus “James Jones, a 
casual labourer, was yesterday convicted at the 

[65] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Clerkenwell Sessions of stealing a cigarette 
box, the property of Mr. Thomas Jackson, M. 
P., and was sentenced to one month's hard 
labour" is journalism, while Mr. Galsworthy's 
Silver Box is literature. Again, “To-day we 
celebrate the tercentenary of the death of one of 
the greatest of all Englishmen. We have 
sometimes been called a nation of shopkeepers, 
and yet no country is richer in her poets than 
England, and of these the acknowledged chief 
is William Shakespeare. Here was one who 
sounded the full gamut of human passions, and 
the universality of his genius has carried his 
fame into every quarter of the civilised globe. 
We honour not only Shakespeare, but ourselves 
in drinking to-day to the immortal memory of 
one whose work will endure as long as the 
English language is spoken"—is an example of 
journalism at its idlest, while Ben Jonson's 
panegyric and Arnold's sonnet, separated by 
two hundred and fifty years, are alike litera¬ 
ture. 

The flood of this journalism, considerable in 
Tennyson’s time and almost devastating in 
our own, has added seriously to the poet’s dif- 
[ 66 ] ‘ 


THE PROBLEMS OF THE VICTORIANS 


ficulties in the use of language. Whole tracts 
of English have been turned over to the service 
of this business of conveying useless informa¬ 
tion to people who are no whit the better for 
receiving it, or of giving an appearance of in¬ 
dependent profundity to rough and ready mass 
opinion. The language has in consequence be¬ 
come so infested with cliches that a whole 
school of writers has arisen whose sole ambition 
would seem to be an ostentatious avoidance of 
these. Byron, the first great English poet to 
allow a humorous-ironic strain to run through 
the body of his serious poetry, as apart from 
professed satire, frequently made effective use 
of this journalistic quality in language, and the 
practice has been a common one with explicitly 
comic writers in verse ever since. But in doing 
this Byron exploited the growing activities of 
the Press very happily to his own purposes, 
without in any way enlarging the range of ex¬ 
pression for poetry’s normal habit. The suc¬ 
cess of his license, indeed, made the conditions 
of diction even more exacting for his succes¬ 
sors, since the journalistic cliche once dignified 
by literary usage was more definitely than ever 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


ruled out as a poetic instrument. Fortune had 
rewarded the brave once, but the second comer 
could only expect to be dubbed foolhardy. 
After Byron, poetry had to remind herself that 
to relate her diction to the common idiomatic 
speech of her time and to relate it to the so¬ 
phisticated periods of the leading article or 
the heavy facetiousness of the debating room 
were quite different things. She had to be 
careful not to be beguiled into doing seriously 
what Byron had done brilliantly with his 
tongue in his cheek. She had brought off a 
very good joke out of motley once, but that was 
enough; henceforth it must be played, when 
at all, in full view with cap and bells complete. 
The improviser had for once become the seer 
by some caprice of inspiration, and poetry 
would be wise to leave it at that . 1 

Finally, Tennyson found a language that as 
a literary vehicle was nearly five hundred years 
old, three hundred at least of which had been 
of rich and unceasing activity. This fact pre¬ 
sented a difficulty distinct from that which has 


1 These remarks, it need hardly be added, apply to part 
of Byron’s work only. 

[68] 


THE PROBLEMS OF THE VICTORIANS 

been examined in connection with Shake¬ 
speare’s use of the word “sessions.” Not only 
had particular words acquired a specific associa¬ 
tive value which made them dangerous for use 
again in poetry, but the whole construction of 
a poetic phrase was now beset by mazes of 
seductive suggestion, word calling up word in 
long sequence from the vast stores of poetry 
that had been accumulated by the race. It was 
no longer a very easy thing to see the object 
before you, precisely in its immediate appear¬ 
ance, wholly dissociated from any company 
that it might have kept in some earlier creative 
presentation. It needed something of a con¬ 
scious effort in looking at yellow sands to re¬ 
mind yourself that coral was not necessarily 
somewhere about, to remember that an alba¬ 
tross was not positively doomed to meet its 
death from a cross-bow, to hear the nightingale 
without hearing also the undertones of “tears 
amid the alien corn,” to see a country graveyard 
wholly unshadowed by the ghosts of vil¬ 
lage Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons. 
There was no simple way of escape for the poet 
from this storied experience of his ancestry. 
[69] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


He had to face it courageously like the rest of 
experience, to assimilate and master it, and in 
so far as it passed into his work at all, as it was 
bound to do in some measure, to stamp it with 
his own pressure and so recreate it. But it did 
complicate his task. We may now see how 
Tennyson dealt with this and the other prob¬ 
lems that have been presented. 


[ 70 ] 


Chapter IV 

Tennyson’s Diction 

I N connection with his diction it will be con¬ 
venient at first to consider a single poem of 
Tennyson’s, which embodies most of the char¬ 
acteristics of his style—-this from In Memori - 
am — 


Calm is the morn without a sound, 

Calm as to suit a calmer grief, 

And only thro’ the faded leaf 
The chestnut pattering to the ground: 

Calm and deep peace on this high wold. 
And on these dews that drench the furze 
And all the silvery gossamers 
That twinkle into green and gold: 

Calm and still light on yon great plain 
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, 
And crowded farms and lessening towers, 
To mingle with the bounding main: 

Calm and deep peace in this wide air, 

These leaves that redden to the fall; 

And in my heart, if calm at all, 

If any calm, a calm despair; 

[ 71 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, 

And waves that sway themselves in rest, 

And dead calm in that noble breast 
Which heaves but with the heaving deep. 

First in these lines is apparent a poetic virtue 
of which Tennyson was an almost constant 
master, the faculty for seeing a natural object 
in minutely exact definition. “Thro’ the faded 
leaf The chestnut pattering to the ground,” 
the “dews that drench the furze,” the whole of 
the third stanza, the “waves that sway them¬ 
selves in rest,” each phrase is incontrovertible 
evidence of a thing personally seen with crea¬ 
tive intensity. In the first of these examples 
we see how Tennyson could manage that elab¬ 
oration of the simple statement, which is the 
first of the four problems that have been dis¬ 
cussed as awaiting him. If Chaucer had been 
presenting an autumn landscape—which, in his 
preoccupation with spring, he very rarely did— 
and had wanted to use foliage as a figure, he 
would almost certainly have been content with 
“the faded leaf” without embellishment, and 
from his tongue the economy would have 
been convincing. But by Tennyson’s time the 
[ 72 ] 


Tennyson’s diction 

phrase by itself would have been something 
barren, and it needed fertilising by some 
further imaginative life. To the simple image 
Tennyson adds another, and together they 
brighten into one perfect realisation. Faded 
leaves, falling chestnuts—there for any school¬ 
boy’s observation, and yet, placed thus exactly, 
the witnesses of a rich poetic power in full 
exercise. And whenever Tennyson felt called 
upon to intensify the simple statement of a 
natural object, he was able to do it by refer¬ 
ence to his own vivid experience, and thus to 
deal satisfactorily with the problem in ques¬ 
tion, and also, so far as the delineation of land¬ 
scape (as apart from the further questions of 
human emotion and character) was concerned, 
to keep his yellow sands away from coral. If 
he wants to speak of marshy waste-lands, the 
“glooming flats” of Lincolnshire are to mind 
for his purpose, and the “glooming” is the 
signature written at once; if the violets were to 
blow, he had seen them “thick by ashen roots”; 
and even the familiar poppy in sleep he has 
seen precisely hanging from “the craggy ledge.” 
I have said that Tennyson heightened his 

[ 73 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


images in this way whenever he felt called 
upon to do so—called upon, that is to say, by 
the unaccountable poetic impulse. It was, even 
with so deliberate an artist, no matter of course 
to do this, and he was often, and by a just 
instinct, content to leave the simple image in 
its simplicity, though he would be careful not 
to leave it unfortified by some such intensifi¬ 
cation near at hand. Love is to be looked for 
not only “by the happy threshold” but also 


hand in hand with Plenty in the maize, 
Or red with spirted purple of the vats, 

Or foxlike in the vine . . . 


though sometimes the poet leaves magic to the 
barest statement with an entirely just confi¬ 
dence, as in— 

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far 
over the summer sea . . . 


where even Chaucer is matched for rich econ¬ 
omy of descriptive effect. In which connec¬ 
tion it may be as well here to remark that 
Tennyson was a notable example of the poets 

[ 74 ] 


Tennyson’s diction 


who pass in the evolution of their style from a 
luxuriously decorative manner to this same 
economy as a final characteristic. And it is a 
characteristic that can be arrived at through 
evolution only, it can never as it were be 
jumped at in the beginning. The simplicity of 
ignorance is inevitably bald commonplace, but 
the simplicity slowly achieved out of a vast 
poetic experience may be Crossing the Bar. It 
may be worth while to look again at this noble 
lyric, set beside something of the poet’s early 
luxuriance. The Lady of Shalott was written 
when he was twenty-three years old:— 

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, 

He rode between the barley-sheaves, 

The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves, 

And flamed upon the brazen greaves 
Of bold Sir Lancelot. 

A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d 
To a lady in his shield, 

That sparkled on the yellow field, 

Beside remote Shalott. 

All in the blue unclouded weather 
Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle leather. 

The helmet and the helmet-feather 
Burn’d like one burning flame together, 

[ 75 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


As he rode down to Camelot. 

As often thro’ the purple night, 

Below the starry clusters bright 
Some bearded meteor, trailing light, 

Moves over still Shalott. 

The missal-like illumination of verse such as 
this will be further mentioned, but for the mo¬ 
ment I want merely to contrast it with this, 
written sixty years later, when the poet was 
over eighty:— 

Sunset and evening star, 

And one clear call for me! 

And may there be no moaning of the bar, 

When I put out to sea. 

But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

Too full for sound and foam, 

When that which drew from out the boundless deep 
Turns again home. 

Twilight and evening bell, 

And after that the dark! 

And may there be no sadness of farewell, 

When I embark; 

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place 
The flood may bear me far, 

I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crost the bar. 

[ 76 ] 


tennyson’s diction 

In the diction of that there is a serene directness 
that has been won only out of many years of 
technical liberality. 

The second of our problems in diction, that 
of keeping clear of words with a too definitely 
associative value, Tennyson met in his best 
work by a steady concentration on his own sub¬ 
ject. Although in actual craftsmanship he 
was sophisticated and selective in a far more 
than common degree, an unusually self-con¬ 
scious artist, in the spiritual and emotional 
content of his poetry Tennyson had hardly any 
virtuosity at all. His success or failure in 
philosophic originality will be discussed in a 
later section of this essay, but the point here is 
that in the experiences of his soul he may often 
have been strangely disingenuous for a major 
poet, but he was always absolutely himself. 
His poetic technique is clearly and manifoldly 
subject to influence—Shakespeare, Milton, 
Pope even, Byron by glimpses, Keats—with¬ 
out any one of these his manner would have 
been a little different, but upon the emotional 
life of his poetry there is practically no literary 
influence discernible at all. The tumultuous 
[ 77 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


passion of the Elizabethans, the subtle lay 
metaphysic of Donne, Milton’s darkly volup¬ 
tuous Puritanism, Herrick’s exquisitely tutored 
rustic urbanity, Wordsworth’s moral clairvoy¬ 
ance—all these might never have existed in 
poetry at all for the traces of them to be found 
in the self-portraiture figured in Tennyson’s 
art. Whether the fact is to be.accounted as a 
defect or a virtue depends upon what we ask 
of poetry. To return to our passage from In 
Memoriam — 

Calm is the morn without a sound . . . 

we cannot but at once allow the obvious excel¬ 
lence of the mere writing, but if we want acute 
analysis of sorrow in her more elusive moods 
or discovering flights of mysticism, we shall 
find little enough of satisfaction. Here is 
nothing but the most childlike assertion of calm 
grief and its reflection in the calm dissolution 
of an autumn landscape. But if we are content 
with a mood so unvexed by argument, a thought 
so incapable of obscurity, we shall be well re¬ 
warded. For this very fixity of emotional pur- 
[ 78 ] 


Tennyson’s diction 


pose, to be confused perhaps by an unsympa¬ 
thetic judgment with an empty self-sufficiency, 
achieves its own purity of poetic style with, for 
us, its accompanying delight. It is just because 
Tennyson is so singly intent upon the elemen¬ 
tary content matter of his poetry that he has no 
need of care to avoid assuming other men’s 
emotions, or, more precisely, their emotional 
accent. In the “calm is the morn” passage 
there is not a word that is obviously reminis¬ 
cent. Tennyson’s mind may be a figure of 
homespun in the intellectual world, but it can 
appear in any company without the slightest 
embarrassment and apparently without any 
temptation to ape livelier or more ceremonious 
wits. This poet was in a literal sense too 
simple to be in even remote danger of borrow¬ 
ing “sessions.” 

Of the journalistic virus Tennyson’s style 
cannot be said to be so entirely free. When he 
was concerned with the life of his own moods he 
was, as has just been said, proof against poetic 
suggestion from without, but when his subject 
was some public occasion or some external event 
that only accidentally came within his own ex- 
[ 79 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


perience, he was not so wholly proof against 
the cliches of journalism. It is true that he 
was one of the best occasional poets in the lan¬ 
guage, and particularly in the graver manner 
of his laureate office. And yet, even in the 
justly famous Ode on the Death of the Duke of 
Wellington there is, in parts at least, a lower 
level of integrity in expression than, for ex¬ 
ample again, in our passage from In Memo - 
Ham, where, with the doubtful exception of 
“that noble breast,” there is not a word that is 
not manifestly of the poet’s own minting. But 
in the Ode, written clearly upon an occasion by 
which Tennyson was deeply moved, and one 
rich in associations that were of peculiar ap¬ 
peal to his genius, he cannot keep his style 
wholly free of editorial influence. This is not 
to speak in disparagement of a poem to which 
on the whole the term magnificent is not mis¬ 
applied, and one of the supreme successes of 
its kind. But to acknowledge this is not to con¬ 
cede that the whole of the splendid eulogy of 
“the statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute” is 
couched in terms of pure poetry. It was hardly 


Tennyson’s diction 

the Tennyson of the finest authority whom we 
find addressing Nelson thus— 


Thine island loves thee well, thou famous man, 
The greatest sailor since our world began. . . . 

and Wellington as— 

England’s greatest son, 

He that gain’d a hundred fights 
Nor ever lost an English gun . . . 

and as being 


as the greatest only are, 

In his simplicity sublime . . . 

who called upon an unregenerate world to 

Let his great example stand 
Colossal, seen of every land . . . 


and exclaimed that on Napoleon’s overthrow 
at Waterloo 


Heaven flash’d a sudden jubilant ray. 

[ 81 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


These are not the simplicities of 

Calm and deep peace in this wide air, 

These leaves that redden to the fall; 

And in my heart, if calm at all, 

If any calm, a calm despair . . . 

nor of such things as this, from the Ode itself— 

More than is of man’s degree 
Must be with us, watching here 
At this, our great solemnity. 

Whom we see not we revere, 

We revere, and we refrain 
From talk of battles loud and vain, 

And brawling memories all too free 
For such a wise humility 
As befits a solemn fane; 

We revere, and while we hear 
The tides of Music’s golden sea 
Setting towards eternity, 

Uplifted high in heart and hope are we, 

Until we doubt not that for one so true 
There must be other nobler work to do 
Than when he fought at Waterloo . . . 

Nor, on the other hand, are the passages here 
questioned, and others like them, instances of 
the lowered tension in writing such as we often 
[ 82 ] 


Tennyson’s diction 

find introduced with artistic propriety into nar¬ 
rative poetry. They are, rather, indications 
that the poet is momentarily relaxed in crea¬ 
tive attention, and borrowing, and from a bad 
source at that. Other examples may be found 
by those who care to look for them, in both 
Locksley Halls , and in a way, though less 
evidently and with more excuse, from such 
amusing exercises as the Northern Farmer 
poems. 

Tis’n them as ’as munny as breaks into ’ouses an’ 
steals, 

Them as ’as coats to their backs an’ taakes their regu¬ 
lar meals. 

Noa, but it’s them as niver knaws wheer a meal’s to 
be ’ad. 

Taake my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is 
bad. 

That has humorous charm, and as a tour de 
force in writing its merit is obvious. But it 
comes something short of poetry, because it is 
fundamentally an expression which is not nat¬ 
ural to the poet. It is witty and extremely 
sensitive reporting, but it is no more, in so 
far, that is to say, as the diction is concerned, 
[ 83 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


the selective and shaping power of art not being 
here in question. In saying that poetic lan¬ 
guage should be based on common idiom, we 
mean an idiom that is naturally within the 
poet’s range, part of his own expressive habit, 
not an idiom that he deliberately copies. The 
Northern Farmer poems remain brilliant strokes 
of virtuosity, but Tennyson the poet had very 
little to do with them. It must be repeated, 
however, that in the great body of his work that 
explores the world of his own emotions, his re¬ 
sponse to nature and his simple but ever-brood¬ 
ing speculation, there is hardly a hint of the 
journalist confusing the poet. 

Tennyson in relation to the fourth of our 
problems, that of allowing natural objects to 
call up ready-shaped images in association from 
the stores of poetry, has already been briefly 
considered in connection with his faded leaf 
and falling chestnut. And in this matter he 
was no more troubled when the content of his 
poetry was something other than natural de¬ 
scription and its inferences. He writes— 

And I would that my tongue could utter 

The thoughts that arise in me . . . 

[ 84 ] 


Tennyson’s diction 

but so intent is the mood that the siren voices 
of literature are beyond hearing, and on a sea 
unruffled by any alien wind 

the stately ships go on 
To their haven under the hill. 

When Tennyson first published his poetry—- 
or the more significant part of his juvenile 
poetry—there would be little to impress itself 
as remarkable originality of style, and this was 
as it should be. It is only the eccentric in art 
that arrests garrulous attention, an attention 
that has no memory. But the readers of the 
volumes of 1830 and 1833 could not but be 
aware that here was the old faculty speaking 
with a note of new personality, an impression 
to be strikingly confirmed in 1842. This was 
English poetry plainly enough, quite content 
to give tradition its due, properly proud of its 
ancestry, and yet it was the work of a man 
deeply engaged, indeed almost reclusively so, 
in the artistic ordering of his own spiritual life. 
In so far as he satisfactorily solved the techni¬ 
cal problems that have been mentioned, he did 
so by a subconscious instinct of the creative 

[85] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


mind—they cannot, it is needless to say, have 
appeared to him in the simple tabulation that 
we are able to give them at this distance of 
time. But the instinct that performed this of¬ 
fice for him told him too that in drawing freely 
upon the tradition of English versification he 
must also add to it to be justified of his calling. 
This is true of every poet, but Tennyson knew 
it more decidedly, or at least more explicitly, 
than most. Tennyson’s subject matter could 
not well have been more unsophisticated, less 
affected by the challenge of the spiritual experi¬ 
ence of the great poets who preceded him; but 
at the same time his style could not well have 
been more manipulated, more meticulously and 
self-consciously wrought into the highest ex¬ 
cellence that he could attain. The picture of 
Tennyson as a “poet of the file,” forever la¬ 
bouring in a lapidarian discontent, is, perhaps, 
one that has been overdrawn, but hardly any 
creative faculty of the first rank in poetry has 
ever been so pervaded by the mood of the arti¬ 
ficer. Nothing could be wider of the truth 
than to argue that the poise and balance and 
perfect dovetailing that mark all his best versi- 


tennyson’s diction 

fication are merely so much decoration, a kind 
of seductive jugglery that used up good energy 
that might have been better employed. It was 
his peculiar distinction as a poetic craftsman 
that he was able to work his style to the highest 
pitch of minutely considered arrangement with¬ 
out sacrificing anything of spontaneity in effect. 

The stanzas quoted from The Lady of Sha - 
lott show something of Tennyson’s deftness in 
the disposition of his words. A more matured 
example is this from The Trine ess — 

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; 
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; 

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: 

The firefly wakens: waken thou with me. 

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost. 
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me. 

Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars, 

And all thy heart lies open unto me. 

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves 
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me. 

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, 

And slips into the bosom of the lake: 

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip 
Into my bosom and be lost in me: 

[ 87 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


A good deal has been said by critics about 
Tennyson’s mastery over vowel and consonan¬ 
tal movement, but, in the light of such instances 
as this, certainly not more than enough, and 
in these later days at least rather less, I think, 
than is due. It is easy for unsympathetic criti¬ 
cism to see nothing but manufactured verse in 
this poem, but it is always easy for unsympa¬ 
thetic criticism to be stupidly unjust. This is 
not merely line writing, it is style, and not to 
allow this is to be wanton about Tennyson alto¬ 
gether. Whatever personal taste may say, con¬ 
sidered judgment should not permit itself to 
be blinded thus by partialities. That the artis¬ 
try in these lines is deliberate, proving itself at 
every word, indeed at every letter, is unques¬ 
tionable, but it is equally clear that the fusion 
of a poetic mood into this limpidly composed 
expression is complete. The perfect packing 
or building of the words, as though they had 
something of the quality of solid material in 
them, was for Tennyson an actual means of 
expression, and one in which he has never been 
excelled, and, perhaps, never equalled. Under 
analysis two lines in the poem call for separate 
comment. 


[88] 


tennyson’s diction 

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font 

is exquisitely done, but detraction might protest 
that it is just a shade too assertively pictur¬ 
esque, and there is, moreover, for once a definite 
reminiscence of Keats with his “beaded bubbles 
winking at the brim.” The line is, in some odd 
way, almost too good. Then we have that 
other one, 

Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars, 

which stands out by itself, as it would do in 
any context, by sheer imaginative power. But 
the poem for the rest is a normal illustration of 
Tennyson’s method. The verbal opulence is 
peculiarly his own. It is not like that of Keats, 
such as he uses in many passages of The Eve of 
St. Agnes , where the inspiration is an almost 
swooning delight in tropical colours and spiced 
odours and textures very mellow to the touch. 
Keats aimed at and succeeded marvellously in 
finding in words some equivalence for these 
sensations, but with Tennyson the artistic in¬ 
tention was to arrest some almost impalpable 
property in the words themselves. When we 
[ 89 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


charge a poet with merely using words we can 
only mean that he is using impoverished words. 
To complain that Tennyson overestimated the 
power of words to give up some remote, and as 
it were almost independent, life of their own to 
the poet’s incantation, is to complain that he 
presumed to look upon language as in itself a 
source of poetic life, which was no very wild 
thing for a poet to do, since life, like God, does 
move in a mysterious way. “Now droops the 
milk-white peacock like a ghost,” “Now slides 
the silent meteor on,” “Now folds the lily all 
her sweetness up, And slips into the bosom of 
the lake”—these words are revealing something 
at Tennyson’s touch that they had kept to 
themselves before. What precisely it is we 
cannot say, because it exists only in terms of 
Tennyson’s divine manipulation. We can talk, 
rationally enough, about vowels and conson¬ 
ants, but we are still compelled to leave some¬ 
thing unsaid. But we miss much of the essen¬ 
tial Tennyson if we do not recognise that in 
his orchestration of language he was, in a sense 
almost peculiar to himself among poets, cre¬ 
ating life. “The chestnut pattering to the 


tennyson’s diction 

ground,” already quoted, may be given as an¬ 
other case in point. “Pattering” is here some¬ 
thing more than the best word in the usual 
sense. It is true that it is more precise than 
“falling,” or “dropping,” but when that margin 
of superiority is allowed for there is still some¬ 
thing over. And that something is not a lucky 
but inessential grace; it is life, and life of 
Tennyson’s especial engendering. 

This was, I think, Tennyson’s particular en¬ 
richment of the tradition that he took up. A 
few other poets, Rossetti, for example, and 
others less celebrated, such as de Tabley, caught 
something of the way of it, but on the whole 
it was a very personal thing, perfected by its 
originator , 1 and not having any lasting influ¬ 
ence. With Tennyson came and went the vital 
undertone of such lines as— 

The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 

The murmuring of innumerable bees. 

If it was heard again it could be as an echo 
only. 

1 This is not to deny the quality to every poet before 
Tennyson, obviously. But never before had it been so 
salient a characteristic of a poetic style, nor has it been 
since. 

[ 91 ] 


Chapter V 

Brownings Diction 

O lyric love, half-angel and half-bird 
And all a wonder and a wild desire,— 

Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, 

Took sanctuary within the holier blue, 

And sang a kindred soul out to his face,— 

Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart— 

When the first summons from the darkling earth 
Reach’d thee amid thy chambers, blanch’d their blue, 
And bared them of the glory—to drop down, 

To toil for man, to suffer or to die,— 

N OT considering the content matter, but 
looking alone at the way of writing, there 
is a clear resemblance between this celebrated 
passage from Browning and any characteristic 
example of Tennyson’s maturer manner. Ten¬ 
nyson might have hesitated at “red-ripe of the 
heart,” and have avoided the repetition of 
“blue” at the end of a line, but otherwise there 
is nothing either beyond or below his reach in 
Browning’s full-bodied and admirably balanced 
[ 92 ] 


browning’s diction 

blank verse. Nor was Browning incapable of 
the richly-vestured lyric movement of which 
Tennyson was a master—as this from Para¬ 
celsus may show— 

And strew faint sweetness from some old 
Egyptian’s fine worm-eaten shroud 
Which breaks to dust when once unroll’d; 

Or shredded perfume, like a cloud 
From closet long to quiet vow’d, 

With moth’d and dropping arras hung, 
Mouldering her lute and books among, 

As when a queen, long dead, was young. 

And then we pass from these, done so to speak 
by a master in the best manner of his age, to— 

I want to know a butcher paints, 

A baker rhymes for his pursuit, 
Candlestick-maker much acquaints 
His soul with song, or, haply mute, 

Blows out his brains upon the flute. . . . 

and we seem almost to be listening to a differ¬ 
ent voice. Many poets have written in more 
than one manner. Tennyson himself had his 
familiar style, the poem written in his old age 
to FitzGerald, for example, which is as distinct 
[ 93 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


from his graver manner as was the Keats of the 
Mermaid lines from the Keats of the Odes, or 
Milton in the verses to Hobson the carrier from 
himself in Samson Agonistes . But in these 
other cases the more colloquial manner is de¬ 
liberately assumed for some occasion of low¬ 
ered poetic pressure, not in the least unworthy 
or trivial, but of less imaginative urgency than 
“this great argument,” while with Browning 
it becomes, no less than this greater ceremony, 
a serious poetic style, and one that as time went 
by more and more governed his practice. But 
Browning did not stay at the point indicated 
by “I want to know a butcher paints.” So far 
he was in some measure, and more than any 
other major poet, following the example of 
Byron, and replacing poetic elevation—using 
the word in its original sense—by a racy con- 
versationalism. He was, fairly enough, basing 
his poetic style upon common idiom, but the 
common idiom of his use was rather evangelised 
into poetic efficiency than distilled into poetic 
purity. Before he could conceivably have writ¬ 
ten “blows out his brains upon the flute” Ten¬ 
nyson would have been seen consciously put- 


browning’s diction 


ting his singing robes aside, but it came from 
Browning in full dress. But the unequivocal 
use of witty tap-room rhetoric, or call it what 
you will, was not all, nor, be it said, was it in 
Browning’s handling an easy or undistinguished 
thing. This was in no sense mere reporting. 
Before the idiom got into his verse it was sub¬ 
jected to a very keen intellectual scrutiny and 
ordering, but when it did get there it was still 
far more recognisably itself than was common 
in poetry. When, however, we come upon such 
lines as— 

Hobbs hints blue,—straight he turtle eats: 

Nobbs prints blue,—claret crowns his cup: 

Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats,— 

Both gorge. Who fished the murex up? 

What porridge had John Keats? 

which we frequently do, though this famous 
passage is admittedly an extreme case, we have 
to deal with something more than the direct 
removal of common idiom into verse. Apart 
from actual obscurity of meaning, we have 
here a poetic style that is strangely elusive in 
its origin. It is useless to dismiss it as being 
the mere vagary of a great but wilful poet. 

[ 95 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Browning in this and many similar passages 
was deliberately carrying out some technical 
purpose, and, directed by some instinct or an¬ 
other, was shaping his material as he wished, 
and not being beaten by it. At the beginning 
of this essay I suggested that Browning’s dis¬ 
tinctive choice of diction was controlled by a 
feeling, dominating him more and more, that 
the poetical resources of the language along tra¬ 
ditional lines were for the moment exhausted— 
clearly as he himself disproved the belief in 
such work as “O lyric love” and “And strew 
faint sweetness.” For the sake of convenience 
in this argument we may speak—quite arbi¬ 
trarily I admit—of Browning’s three character¬ 
istics as Tennysonian, Byronic, and the specifi¬ 
cally Browningesque , 1 not chronologically but 
in character. He was not exclusively engaged 
in any one of these at a given time, but taking 
the body of his mature work as a whole, it 
might be said that its common measure is the 
second of these manners, often brightened by 
an imaginative strain from the first, and some- 

1 Let me repeat that this is for immediate purposes of 
definition only. Browning’s individual mark is clear enough 
upon his poetry right through. 

[ 96 ] 


browning’s diction 


times complicated by the third. This range and 
variety in his verse remained strictly within 
his style—it was not a case of style too often 
subject to manneristic contortions, as has some¬ 
times been suggested. Browning in his manner 
as well as in his investigation was a very cos¬ 
mopolitan poet, and he could pass in a single 
poem from one decided accent to another with¬ 
out any sense of incongruity. This being so, it 
may be said that the “Browningesque” quality 
in my category is less typically Browning than 
the others; the definition should, perhaps, be 
qualified by adding that it is a quality that he 
brings from a source of his own unaided dis¬ 
covery into the texture of a style emphatically 
his own and yet inseparable from tradition. 
Shop , from which the painting butcher and 
rhyming baker come, shows the three strains 
blended into a perfectly satisfactory whole. 
This is the end of the poem. 


And whither went he*? Ask himself, 

Not me! To change of scene, I think. 
Once sold the ware and pursed the pelf, 
Chaffer was scarce his meat and drink, 
Nor all his music—money-chink. 

[ 97 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Because a man has shop to mind 

In time and peace, since flesh must live, 

Needs spirit lack all life behind, 

All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive, 

All loves except what trade can give ? 

I want to know a butcher paints, 

A baker rhymes for his pursuits, 
Candlestick-maker much acquaints 
His soul with song, or, haply mute. 

Blows out his brains upon the flute. 

But—shop each day and all day long! 

Friend, your good angel slept, your star 
Suffered eclipse, fate did you wrong! 

For where these sorts of treasures are 
There should our hearts be—Christ, how far! 

Here we have the romantic richness, the direct 
conversational idiom, and the crabbed Hobbs- 
Nobbs figure all in one. And this last in 
Browning’s work was, I think, a further de¬ 
velopment of his dissatisfaction with the habit 
of verse as he found it in general use. If the 
“elevated” manner seemed to him to be ex¬ 
hausted, the colloquial manner that he adopted 
as an alternative may very well soon have 
seemed to him to be too flat and commonplace, 
to lack the spring of good poetic writing, and 
[ 98 ] 


BROWNING S DICTION 


it was a natural thing for his genius to enliven 
it not by a return to the accepted manner only 
—though he did this as well—but also by in¬ 
venting a new complex of the common idiom, 
fantastic, involved, and striking, if sometimes 
only by its oddity, yet always alert and per¬ 
sonal. “I want to know a butcher paints” is 
the idiom of ordinary speech lifted bodily into 
poetry with the slightest of sea-changes; “O 
lyric love” is the same idiom ennobled and in¬ 
tensified, transfigured in the traditional way by 
a poetic master; in Nokes and Stokes and their 
azure feats is again the same idiom, but now 
vexed into an attitude, not in the least 
insincerely, but by a poet who has bravely 
but wilfully cut the old moorings and finds 
new ones very far to seek. Nothing could 
be less just than to accuse Browning of de¬ 
liberate antics, but if, even for the most disin¬ 
terested reasons, you forsake solid earth for the 
tight-rope you cannot help performing with the 
pole, and you are lucky if you get across even 
at that, which it must be allowed Browning 
generally did. I said that the stanzas from 
Shop showed the three strains in his style satis- 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


factorily blended, but it would perhaps be 
nearer to the truth to say that they show them 
in close association, each contributing to a satis¬ 
factory whole, and kept by Browning’s art 
from striking any discord, shown by him, in 
short, equally to be natural and congruous ele¬ 
ments in the unity of his style. As showing 
these elements more indistinguishably combined 
worked into one texture, three stanzas may be 
given from A Toccata of Galuppi’s — 

Did young people take their pleasure when the sea 
was warm in May? 

Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to 
mid-day 

When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow 
do you say? 

Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so 
red,— 

On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower 
on its bed, 

O’er the breasts superb abundance where a man might 
base his head ? 

Well (and it was graceful of them), they’d break talk 
off and afford 

—She, to bite her mask’s black velvet, he, to finger on 
his sword, 

[100] 


browning’s diction 

While you sat and play’d Toccatas, stately at the 
clavichord ? 

It will, perhaps, be found that this composite 
style of Browning’s invention is of all in the 
Victorian age the one that has had most influ¬ 
ence upon the poetry of our own time. 


[101] 


Chapter VI 

Tennyson’s Influence■—The Diction of 
Arnold , Rossetti , Morris and 
Swinburne 

B ROADLY speaking, Tennyson and Brown¬ 
ing have come in general opinion to stand 
as the two chief figures in Victorian poetry. Per¬ 
sonal revisions of this estimate are constantly be¬ 
ing made, and often with much critical weight. 
But on the whole, and considering everything 
that goes to the making of permanence in 
poetic reputations, it is doubtful whether the 
popular impression will not continue to hold 
the day. In detail the debate is an endless one, 
nor, so far as mere comparison is concerned, 
is it a very profitable one. I for one find Mat¬ 
thew Arnold, for instance, a more rewarding 
poet, with less waste tissue in his work, and 
as time goes on richer in undiscovered country 
than either Tennyson or Browning, but I should 
not allow my personal preference to place him 
[ 102 ] 


tennyson’s influence 


above them in poetic rank—the evidence 
against me is too weighty for that. In the mat¬ 
ter of diction which we have been discussing, 
for example, in so far as poets can affect their 
own age, Tennyson and Browning were beyond 
question the two most considerable influences 
of their time. Tennyson showed his genera¬ 
tion, in a degree unapproached by any other 
poet who began writing with him, the still fresh 
and vital possibilities of a great traditional 
manner. Browning with equal authority dem¬ 
onstrated what were the likeliest methods of 
departure and revolt from that manner. It is 
true that while Tennyson’s example modified 
the versification of many poets in his own age. 
Browning’s, though perhaps a more durable 
one, was far less immediate in its effect. There 
was a definitely Tennysonian school, a number 
of accomplished and genuine poets who would 
almost certainly have written differently if it 
had not been for the direct influence of the 
master, who, moreover, considerably affected 
the poetic expression of many, indeed of most, 
of his more celebrated contemporaries. Here 
are a few instances from the school— 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


(tf) Come, let us mount the breezy down 
And hearken to the tumult blown 
Up from the champaign and the town. 1 

(b) He roam’d half-round the world of woe, 

Where toil and labour never cease; 

Then dropp’d one little span below 
In search of peace. 

And now to him mild beams and showers, 

And all that he needs to grace his tomb, 
From loneliest regions at all hours, 3 

Unsought for, come. 2 

(c) As ships, becalm’d at eve, that lay 

With canvas drooping, side by side, 

Two towers of sail at dawn of day 

Are scarce, long leagues apart, descried; 

When fell the night, upsprung the breeze, 

And all the darkling hours they plied, 

Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas 
By each was cleaving, side by side : 

E’en so—but why the tale reveal 

Of those, whom year by year unchanged, 
Brief absence join’d anew to feel, 

Astounded, soul from soul estranged 1 ? 3 

1 Frederick Tennyson. 

2 Aubrey de Vere (the younger). 

3 Arthur Hugh Clough. Tennyson would have avoided 
the repeated rhyme sounds of the first and second stanzas, 
and the third, given here for the sense, is below standard. 

[ 104 ] 


tennyson’s influence 

( d ) They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were 
dead, 

They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter 
tears to shed. 

I wept as I remember’d how often you and I 

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down 
the sky. 

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian 
guest, 

A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, 

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, 
awake; 

For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot 
take . 1 

( e ) The feathers of the willow 

Are half of them grown yellow 
Above the swelling stream; 

And ragged are the bushes, 

And rusty now the rushes, 

And wild the clouded gleam. 

The thistle now is older, 

His stalks begin to moulder, 

1 Heraclitus, by William Cory. Cory (Johnson by birth) 
was a very occasional poet, but when he wrote like this 
Tennyson himself could have done it no better, although 
no less an authority than Professor Gilbert Murray, in an 
instructive paper on verse translation, has recently com¬ 
plained, quite unaccountably as it seems to me, that the 
poem fails by reason of trivialitv in diction and rhythm. 

[ 105 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


His head is white as snow; 

The branches are all barer, 

The linnet’s song is rarer. 

The robin pipeth low. 1 

(/) O tender dove, sweet circling in the blue, 

Whom now a delicate cloud receives from view. 
A cool, soft, delicate cloud, we name dim Death! 
O pure white land-lily, inhaling breath 
From spiritual ether among bowers 
Of evergreen in the ever-living flowers 
Yonder aloft upon the airy height, 

Mine eyes may scarce arrive at thy still light! 2 

(g) Hear, O ye Lemnians, hear a full brief word 
Before I go, for surely from this day 
My voice shall be a silence on your rocks, 

My face a dimness with a few old men 
Remembered hardly. As day fathers day 
’Tis meet my memory pass; ay, meet that all 
Change and be changed. So roll the stars along 
And the great world is crown’d with silent lights 
Watching her changes, and no thing endures. 3 

I need hardly say that I do not suggest that 
the poets from whom these examples—almost 
at random—are given, and many who could be 


1 Richard Watson Dixon. 

2 Roden Noel. 

3 Lord de Tabley. 


[ 106 ] 


Tennyson’s influence 

placed in their company, are merely imitators 
of Tennyson. Men like Clough, Dixon, and 
de Tabley were fine spirits finely touched to 
song. Clough, to speculate idly, with a little 
more energy, might have found his way into 
the great group of his age. Dixon was a lyric 
poet who has been eulogised by so fastidious a 
critic as Mr. Bridges, which is warrant enough 
for any man. And de Tabley constantly got 
to the summits, only to find them too slippery 
for long foothold. But, individual as these 
and the others were in their gifts, the extracts 
given are enough to show clearly how suscep¬ 
tible the poetry of the age was to Tennyson’s 
diction. Generally speaking, this was all to 
the good. Predominating influences are in¬ 
evitable among any generation of poets, and it 
was no bad fortune for a large number of the 
Victorians to find so good a preceptor. With 
one possible exception, everything that these 
poets of real but not commanding achievement 
got from Tennyson was gain. They took from 
him no eccentricity, but each according to his 
own powers something of his new interpreta- 
[107] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


tion of a tradition that was the common herit¬ 
age. The possible exception was de Tabley, 
who, the more he is read, the more he impresses 
with his very rare potentialities. He, perhaps, 
alone among the poets of anything like his nat¬ 
ural endowment, made at times too complete a 
surrender to example. A careful study of his 
verse convinces me that the lapses from ex¬ 
cellence, of which it is in danger at every turn, 
are almost entirely the result of an habitual 
recollection, in relaxed moods, of Tennyson’s 
manner, which in happier moments influenced 
him wholly for good. If, as I have already 
suggested, he more than the others could some¬ 
times catch the particular enchantment in Ten¬ 
nyson’s use of words, the enchantment that 
save for a stray note here and there came and 
went with the master, he also suffered more 
than the others by reason of his very sensibility. 
He could write— 

Say what you will and have your sneer and go. 

You see the specks, we only need the fruit 
Of a great life, whose truth—men hate truth so— 
No lukewarm age of compromise could suit. 

Laugh and be mute! 

[ 108 ] 


tennyson’s influence 
but he could also write— 

“And what is Love by nature 
My pretty true-love sighs. 

And I reply, in feature 
A child with pensive eyes. 

An infant forehead shaded 
With many ringlet rings, 

And pearly shoulders faded 
In the colour of his wings. 

Before returning to Browning, we may con¬ 
sider the influence that Tennyson further had 
—Tennyson, that is again to say, as represent¬ 
ing the age’s normal modification of tradition 
—upon the diction of the more celebrated poets 
of the Victorian era. Matthew Arnold pub¬ 
lished his first book —The Strayed Reveller and 
other Poems (apart from prize poems at Rugby 
and Oxford) in 1849, when he was twenty- 
seven years of age, and his second, Empedocles 
on Etna , three years later. So little attention 
was paid to books that contained some of the 
loveliest poetry of a century, that their author 
successively withdrew each of them from pub¬ 
lication when a few copies had gone out, and 
they have become bibliographical treasures. 
[109] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


With the two volumes of Poems , 1853 and 
1855, however, he took his place among the ac¬ 
knowledged poets of the time, and although he 
has never been everybody’s poet, he has never 
since then been without admirers who would 
hardly admit any of his contemporaries as his 
better. The nature of his poetry will be re¬ 
ferred to in the proper place, but its diction is 
of great importance in a study of the age’s 
versification. Professor Saintsbury 1 (who is 
just a little inclined to stand for the illiberal 
estimate of Arnold as a poet) says “he is most 
consistent in employing, or at least endeavour¬ 
ing to employ, a severer kind of diction and 
versification, drawing itself back from the 
florid and flowing Tennysonian scheme towards 
the stiffer movement and graver tones of 
Wordsworth, Gray, and (in his later years) 
Milton.” This is very perspicuous, but the 
very fact that there was in Arnold’s style some¬ 
thing of a conscious drawing back from Tenny- 


1 1 have not in general much use for criticism that quotes 
other criticism, but at this time of day any one may steal 
from the stores of Professor Saintsbury’s learning and 
wisdom, and although there is no modern critic, perhaps, 
so provocative as he, there is none who has left his mark 
so indelibly upon every subsequent judgment of English 
poetry. 


[110] 


tennyson’s influence 

son’s manner implies that the influence of the 
older poet was by no means without its effect, 
and we shall find plainly that this was so. The 
fact is that Tennyson, “florid and flowing” as 
he may have been at times, was far from un¬ 
conscious in much of his finest work of those 
models to whom Arnold is said to have turned 
by way of escape as it were. Neither Milton 
nor Gray nor Wordsworth could have written 
more gravely-toned than this, the Tennyson of 
Ulysses — 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ 

We are not now the strength which in old days 
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; 
One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. . . . 

and, on the other hand, it is impossible to miss 
Tennyson’s modification of those models in 
much of Arnold’s representative poetry, or at 
least not to be aware that Arnold’s own in¬ 
stinct is moving in the same direction. 

[in] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Alack, for Corydon no rival now!— 

But when Sicilian shepherds lost a mate, 

Some good survivor with his flute would go, 
Piping a ditty sad for Bion’s fate, 

And cross the unpermitted ferry’s flow. 

And relax Pluto’s brow, 

And make leap up with joy the beauteous head 
Of Prosperine, among whose crowned hair 
Are flowers, first open’d on Sicilian air, 

And flute his friend, like Orpheus, from the dead. 

If that is a return to an older manner, it is an 
older manner with a difference, and the differ¬ 
ence is one that in the first place was of Tenny¬ 
son’s invention. Arnold was too personal a 
poet not to invest even his acquired character¬ 
istics with his own stamp, but when we read 
verse like this we know that Milton, Gray and 
Wordsworth were not the only masters. And, 
in fact, Tennyson’s particular “linked sweet¬ 
ness long drawn out” was not more certainly 
achieved by its originator himself than by 
Arnold in such passages as— 

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? 

Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, 
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, 
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon. . . . 

[ 112 ] 


tennyson’s influence 


Thee, at the ferry, Oxford riders blithe, 

Returning home on summer nights, have met 
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock-hithe, 
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet. . . . 

and 

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 

Retreating to the breath 

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world. . . . 


and 


Dost thou once more assay 
Thy flight, and feel come over thee, 

Poor Fugitive, the feathery change 

Once more, and once more seem to make resound 

With love and hate, triumph and agony, 

Lone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale*? 

Listen, Eugenia— 

How thick the bursts come crowding through the 
leaves! 

Again—thou hearest! 

Eternal Passion! 

Eternal Pain! 


Instances could be multiplied: they abound in 
Arnold’s poetry. It is true that Arnold did, 
[ 113 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


more perhaps than any other poet of his time, 
bring back into verse something of the hard, 
jade-like, quality in a phrase that was charac¬ 
teristic of Milton, and almost even more so of 
Donne, Vaughan and many seventeenth-cen¬ 
tury lyrists, in a smaller degree of Gray and 
Wordsworth, hardly attempted by Keats, and 
less by Tennyson. It was a quality, it may 
perhaps be said, borrowed by poetry from the 
great prose writers such as Jeremy Taylor and 
Thomas Browne and Izaak Walton. It is a 
subtle quality, one difficult to get at or define, 
a very attractive thing when well used, and 
yet a quality to which many good poets are in¬ 
different. When Tennyson writes, “His cap¬ 
tain’s ear has heard them boom Bellowing vic¬ 
tory, bellowing doom,” and Browning “And 
yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,” and 
Aubrey de Vere “while such perfect sound Fell 
from his bowstring,” and Poe “Lo, in yon bril¬ 
liant window-niche,” and Longfellow “We can 
make our lives sublime,” and Browning again 
“There’s heaven above, and night by night, I 
look right through its gorgeous roof,” the words 
bellowing, exquisite, perfect, brilliant (though 
[114] 


Tennyson’s influence 

Poe very nearly justifies himself), sublime, and 
gorgeous are all words badly used in poetry, 
mere counters taken lazily from the fingered 
stock of prose. 1 It is precisely the poet’s busi¬ 
ness to translate such words as these into poetry, 
to recreate the things that they stand for in the 
looseness of common talk and not to take them 
over with all their imperfections on them. In 
conversation, even in written prose, they have 
their place and are well enough, but in poetry 
they won’t do—though most poets have blun¬ 
dered in this matter at one time or another. It 
is not a case of forbidding the poet simple and 
commonplace words; these he may use as often 
as he will, if he can use them with mastery. 
He may say the moon is bright, because that 
means something definite, but he may not say 
the moon is exquisite, because that does not 
mean anything definite at all. And he may not 
even say the moon is brilliant—or at least not 
with any safety—because brilliant only means 
bright, which is definite, plus a qualification 
which is quite indefinite; it pretends to say 

1 Each reader may have his quarrel with my instances. 
But they served an argument that seemed worth pursuing. 

[115] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


something more than bright, but leaves us unin¬ 
formed as to what the something more is, and 
so becomes a pretentious word. If the poet 
wants to emphasise the brightness he can do 
so by means of an image, or even by saying 
very bright, if he can, as sometimes he can, 
beguile us into honouring the “very” by rhyth¬ 
mic cunning. But “brilliant” in poetry is in¬ 
organic. Sublime, bellowing, gorgeous and the 
rest of them belong to a large group of words 
that are over-specific or under-specific in mean¬ 
ing for poetry. “Bellowing” implies a very 
particular kind of loud noise, but that particu¬ 
larity is of no significance, and all that the 
word gives us in Tennyson’s verse over and 
above, say, “sounding,” is something that it is 
not worth while to give; it is too specific, so 
that in poetry it acquires a certain kind of 
fatuity. “Gorgeous,” on the other hand, is not 
specific enough. The margin of meaning in it 
beyond some such word as bright or starry or 
shining or, perhaps, encrusted, is something 
known only vaguely to each person as he uses 
it, and not communicated in any definite way 
by the word itself. “Gorgeous roof” means 
[ 116 ] 


Tennyson’s influence 

nothing, in the sense that it is poetry’s obliga¬ 
tion to mean something, that is not accounted 
for by “starry roof.” The added meaning re¬ 
mains something secret to Browning. It is of 
no use in this connection to talk about poetry 
being “suggestive.” The suggestive power of 
poetry should be something that compels us to 
an effort of the mind that results in the crea¬ 
tion of a clear-cut image, not something direct¬ 
ing us into a world of vague sensations and 
guesswork. 

Before proceeding to the next step in the 
analysis of the quality that I have claimed for 
Arnold, there is another group of words to be 
considered that might at first thought seem to 
be of the same kind as those just mentioned. 
Perhaps “magnificent” is as good an example as 
any. Why, it may be asked, should “magnifi¬ 
cent” be suitable for poetic use if “gorgeous” 
is not? Clearly we are on very hazardous 
ground, but the way is, I think, none the less 
certain. We know that instinct has told the 
common practice of poetry to accept the one and 
to reject the other, and the instinct must have 
had some source in reason. Admitting that 
[117] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


what we need in poetry is exact definition, it 
can, I think, be shown that there is this differ¬ 
ence between the two words. “Gorgeous,” in 
itself, means (let us say) “splendid” plus some 
unknown degree of “splendour.” It is not a 
case of splendour of one kind plus—even though 
it be in an unknown degree—splendour of an¬ 
other. So that it depends for its very particu¬ 
larity upon a meaning that finally escapes us, 
and not even Milton with his “Gorgeous 
Tragedy” can quite subdue it to his art. But 
with “magnificent” this is not so. The mean¬ 
ing is still “splendid” (let us say) plus some¬ 
thing, but the something is not now merely an 
undefined further quantity of “splendour.” It 
is, rather, a particular qualification of splendour 
which is derived from the context, and which, 
from the context, will nearly always be found 
to be imaginatively specific. Thus, when 
Wordsworth says— 

Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee . . . 

the figure of “the East” is hardly emphasised 
at all by “gorgeous.” “Splendid” alone would 
[ 118 ] 


tennyson’s influence 

have done the work as well, and not have dis¬ 
turbed our sense of fitness by any pretentious¬ 
ness. If Wordsworth, we feel, wanted to say 
more than that the East was splendid, to con¬ 
vey the distinguishing quality of that splen¬ 
dour, it was his business to do it somehow pre¬ 
cisely, and not to evade his responsibility by 
using a word that, so far as qualification of 
“splendid” goes, leaves us in the air. And, 
from some subtle essence in its nature, the word 
“magnificent” would have served his turn. 
Had he said “the magnificent East,” we should 
—or so it seems decisively to my perception— 
have received the idea of “splendid” from the 
primary meaning of the epithet, which epithet 
would in turn have, by its peculiar evocative 
power, gathered to itself from the context the 
explicit kind of splendour of light and colour 
and jewelled opulence that we associate with 
the East. The word “magnificent,” in short, is 
an organic one in poetry, while “gorgeous” is 
not. When Browning speaks of “that pulse’s 
magnificent come-and-go,” we get the image of 
glowing health reinforced by the idea of a 
superb physical power and functioning, con- 
[119] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


veyed through the word “magnificent” in rela¬ 
tion to “pulse.” “Splendid” here would have 
been measurably less significant, while “gor¬ 
geous”—if we may strain the word’s meaning 
for the purpose of illustration—would, in 
qualifying “splendid,” have weakened the im¬ 
pression instead of strengthening it. Again, as 
a last example, Sir William Watson in his 
Autumn has, within a few lines of each other— 

At thy mute signal, leaf by golden leaf, 
Crumbles the gorgeous year. . . . 

and 

And passage and departure all thy theme 
Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem, 

And thou, at height of thy magnificence, 

A figment and a dream. . . . 

the one of which is nebulous and the other 
shaped. And the language has many pairs or 
groups of words, not necessarily synonymous 
but of a like character, that fall respectively 
into the “gorgeous” or “magnificent” class, as, 
for instance, valorous, heroic; and transparent, 
crystalline; and regrettable or deplorable as 
[ 120 ] 


tennyson’s influence 

against lamentable or grievous; and vicious, 
malignant; and vague, dim; and conceited, 
vain; and expensive, costly, and so on. It is 
hardly safe to say of any word that it can never 
be used seriously in poetry, but of those given 
as belonging to the “gorgeous” group—there 
are hundreds like them—it can at least be said 
that poetry would almost always lose more than 
she would gain by them. 

Arnold’s gift of bringing a certain spare 
prose quality with profit into his poetry is not, 
therefore, to be observed in his use of such 
words as “magnificent” and the rest, which are 
naturally enough poetic, and not dangerous so 
long as they are kept clearly distinguished from 
the specifically prose “gorgeous” group. Nor, 
again, as we have seen, is it to be found in his 
control of such simplicities as “the sun is 
bright,” since these also are—or can be in right 
usage—essentially poetic. Also it is a distinct 
thing from that other simplicity that relies at 
moments of almost overwhelming emotion upon 
an expression stripped of every syllable that 
can go and yet, throbbing with momentum, 
having nothing in it of understatement; the 
[ 121 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


kind of expression of which Shakespeare was 
the supreme master— 

Soft you. A word or two before you go. 

I have done the state some service, and they know’t. 
No more of that. . . . 


and 


O! that a man might know 
The end of this day’s business, ere it come; 
But it sufficeth that the day will end 
And then the end is known . . . 


and 

She should have died hereafter; 

There would have been a time for such a word. . . . 

The quality of which we are speaking in Ar¬ 
nold was, rather, a certain sudden tempering 
of the diction in poetry, with magical result. 
It was a quality that he more than any other 
poet of his time recovered from the seventeenth 
century, the age of poets like Vaughan and 
Marvell who could lift us to the height of 
poetic enjoyment with such prose-habited de¬ 


vices as— 


[ 122 ] 


Tennyson’s influence 


Where no rude foot e’er trod, 

Where, since he walk’d there, only go 
Prophets and friends of God. . . . 


and 

The grave’s a fine and private place. 

These are not at all in the same kind as “She 
should have dkd hereafter.” They depend for 
their effect not upon the sudden release of vast 
cumulative passion, but upon the lovely—al¬ 
most arrogant—draft upon commonplace, the 
perfectly judged use of “friends” and “fine” at 
their utterly unexpected but divinely appointed 
moments. And this effect Arnold could often 
come by, and the rest of the Victorians hardly 
ever. Here are two examples— 

I have a fretted brick-work tomb 
Upon a hill on the right hand, 

Hard by a close of apricots 
Upon the road to Samarcand. 

Thither, O Vizier, will I bear 
This man my pity could not save: 

And, plucking up the marble flags, 

There lay his body in my grave. 

[ 123 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Bring water, nard, and linen rolls, 

Wash off all blood, set smooth each limb. 

They say: “He was not wholly vile, 

Because a king shall bury him.” . . . 

and 

. . . and in his ears 
The murmur of a thousand years: 

Before him he sees Life unroll, 

A placid and continuous whole; 

That general Life, which does not cease, 

Whose secret is not joy, but peace; 

That Life, whose dumb wish is not miss’d 
If birth proceeds, if things subsist: 

The Life of plants, and stones, and rain: 

The Life he craves; if not in vain 
Fate gave, what chance shall not control, 

His sad lucidity of soul. 

The instinct that led Arnold to such expression 
as this was akin to an austerity, sometimes 
stupidly confused with coldness, that is among 
the rarest and most secluded of poetry’s en¬ 
chantments, the austerity of which the poet 
himself wrote— 

Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay, 
Radiant, adorn’d outside; a hidden ground 
Of thought and of austerity within. 

[ 124 ] 


Tennyson’s influence 

If Arnold stood in his age for a chastening of 
the “florid and flowing” Tennysonian manner, 
though less unequivocally so, perhaps, than 
Professor Saintsbury would seem to suggest, 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and 
Swinburne, in their respective ways, carried 
that manner to its extreme emphasis. This, I 
need hardly say, does not mean that the style 
of any of these men was exclusively derived 
from Tennyson, but rather that the character¬ 
istic evolved by Tennyson from poetic tradition 
that warrants Professor Saintsbury’s “florid and 
flowing,” was developed by these younger poets 
into a poetic diction that was drawn partly 
from Tennyson’s own sources and partly from 
Tennyson himself. Just as the influence of 
Milton, Gray and Wordsworth upon Arnold 
was modified by the intervening practice of 
Tennyson, so was the influence of Chau¬ 
cer, Spenser, Shelley, Byron and Keats in 
some measure affected by Tennyson be¬ 
fore they reached Rossetti, Morris and Swin¬ 
burne. 

To set Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel beside one 
of Tennyson’s most highly decorative poems, 

[ 125 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


The Lady of Shalott , for example, is to be 
aware of a new weight in an atmosphere al¬ 
ready heavily charged. The graphic presenta¬ 
tion of Tennyson’s poem is wrought with great 
ingenuity of artifice, but the landscape, al¬ 
though it no longer has the rain-washed clarity 
of Chaucer, is still in the open air. The golden 
sheaves and the Camelot road and the lilied 
island have something of the brightness of un¬ 
faded tapestry, but they have something also 
of summer in Cornwall. In The Blessed 
Damozel we have passed out of day and night 
and are moving in a landscape of gold and blue 
and rose thickly laid on gesso and stuck over 
with precious stones. It glows through a mist 
of colour that is almost sensible to the touch, 
and has been passionately created, not by God 
in Cornwall, but by monks in mediaeval clois¬ 
ters. In Tennyson’s poem there is the artifice 
of a very expert poetic craftsman, applied to a 
vision that is direct and material, in Rossetti’s 
there is a genuine artificiality of imagination, 
expressing itself in a diction suffused with sug¬ 
gestion that is at once ethereal and strictly for¬ 
mal. 


[ 126 ] 


tennyson’s influence 

The blessed damozel lean’d out 
From the gold bar of Heaven; 

Her eyes were deeper than the depth 
Of waters still’d at even; 

She had three lilies in her hand, 

And the stars in her hair were seven. 

These are no waters of earth, nor are the lilies 
and the stars—the three and the seven—those 
of our familiar vision. The water is some pool 
beyond the well at the world’s end, and the 
lilies and the stars are such as might have been 
held one in each hand by the Prologue to a 
fourteenth-century mystery play at the church 
porch. 


Herself shall bring us, hand in hand, 

To Him round whom all souls 
Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered heads 
Bowed with their aureoles: 

And angels meeting us shall sing 
To their citherns and citoles. 


It is not a sufficient explanation of this to say 
merely that Rossetti was a painter as well as a 
poet. Nor was it wholly that he, beyond the 
example of any poet before him, sought to 
[ 127 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


wring the last voluptuous essence out of the 
very nature of words themselves. Nor, finally, 
was diction of this kind simply the inevitable 
consequence of the deliberate Pre-Raphaelite 
pact. Beyond all these contributary causes, 
there was in Rossetti a native distrust of com¬ 
mon life, kept by his artistic vitality just this 
side of morbidity, that led him to the creation 
of a world, lustrous, brooding, its fauna and 
flora always a little fabulous, a world of mur¬ 
mured incantations and living heraldry. Here 
Rossetti suffered the pangs and gathered the 
compensations common to humanity, but his 
emotion, simple in character though it was, 
found its natural element in this embroidered 
and incense-laden world, and could not easily 
fulfil itself elsewhere. And in the diction of his 
poetry Rossetti delineated his world exactly, 
with its “twilit hidden glimmering visages.” 
Hardly any other poet, I suppose, could have 
praised the beloved for her “sultry hair.” 

Morris was profoundly influenced by Rossetti 
in his art, and there was a close personal 
sympathy between them, and yet two poets 
[ 128 ] 


Tennyson’s influence 

could not well be more unlike each other in 
natural temperament. Rossetti’s heavy-lidded 
indolence, his exotic preference for odd beasts 
in the garden, his savour of the apothecary’s 
shop, were far removed from the robust world¬ 
liness of Morris, who loved Socialist meetings, 
and Cotswold winds, and the dye-vats in a 
Staffordshire mill, and fishing for pike in the 
Thames, and even a row in a police-court. 
But the instinct for definite outline and exact 
detail that made him whole-hearted in his 
sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite painters in 
their revolt from what they considered to be a 
smudgy and lazy impressionism, made him 
also very susceptible to the luminous and 
graphic quality of Rossetti’s diction, and, in 
that measure, guided him to his own develop¬ 
ment of the “florid and flowing” Tennysonian 
idiom. But once the impulse was working, it 
sent Morris along his own way of discovery, 
one upon which he had no company of import¬ 
ance. As he progressed in his art from The 
Lady of Shalott and The Blessed Damozel , 
from the lovely exercise of— 

[ 129 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Green holly in Alicia’s hand, 

When the Sword went out to sea , 

With sere oak-leaves did Ursula stand; 

O! yet alas for me ! 

I did but bear a peel’d white wand, 

When the Sword went out to sea. . . . 

the world of mediaeval and classic story became 
less and less mere material for his poetry and 
more and more the actual place of his habita¬ 
tion. No poet has ever so utterly projected 
himself into another age as did Morris. Much 
has been written to show that Morris of The 
Earthly Paradise and Morris of the political 
platform were one and the same person, and 
the doctrine cannot be lightly dismissed. But 
in a sense Sigurd and Jason and Gudrun and 
Atalanta were more vividly and intimately his 
fellows than the chairman and committee and 
the men and women of his audience. Though 
he did not tell them so exactly in so many 
words, his real ambition in going on to the 
political platform at all was to persuade these 
men and women that the Sigurds and the Ata- 
lantas were really the best company in all the 
world, and there willingly for their delight if 
[ 130 ] 


Tennyson’s influence 

they would but know them. And in moving 
among these people of a golden age (these 
people, that is to say, as recorded by the old 
poets, Chaucer and the troubadours and trou - 
veres ) Morris not only steeped himself in their 
physical and spiritual life, he very largely 
caught and re-created the very manner of their 
expression. He did something in the diction of 
his poetry that had never before and is never 
likely again to be attempted successfully, he 
made an archaic idiom a living, personal, and 
original thing. The complaint about “War- 
dour Street” diction that has sometimes been 
made against Morris is stupid and indefensible. 
His poetic style may not please us in all moods, 
but when we are prepared for it we see that, 
unlikely as was his method to bring about such 
an event by the light of experience, it is as 
purely and individually a style as any poet’s, 
and that he has borrowed nothing without 
transmuting it to the strict degree of his obliga¬ 
tion. When he follows Chaucer’s example and 
speaks of the brown bird, or the grey sky, or 
the bright flowers, and leaves it at that, we 
find ourselves accepting the image as complete, 
[ 131 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


so naturally does he adopt the accent of a four¬ 
teenth-century poet and so far do we seem from 
the nineteenth century merely imitating the 
fourteenth. And the whole of his diction is 
radically modified by this circumstance, thus— 

Ah! let me turn the page, nor chronicle 
In many words the death of faith, or tell 
Of meetings by the newly-risen moon, 

Of passionate silence, ’midst the brown birds’ tune, 

Of wild tears wept within the noontide shade, 

Of wild vows spoken that of old were made 
For other ears, when, amidst other flowers, 

He wandered through the love-begetting hours. . . . 

At last 

Into an open space she passed, 

Nigh filled with a wide, shallow lake; 
Amidmost which the fowl did take 
Their pastime. 

And even when his immediate concern, as in 
The Message of the March Wind , is with the 
life of an age that is his own by accident as 
it were, the manner still prevails— 

Now sweet, sweet it is thro’ the land to be straying, 
’Mid the birds and the blossoms and the beasts of the 
field; 


[ 132 ] 


tennyson’s influence 

Love mingles with love, and no evil is weighing 
On thy heart or mine, where all sorrow is heal’d. 

From township to township, o’er down and by tillage 
Far, far have we wander’d and long was the day; 
But now cometh eve at the end of the village, 

Where over the grey wall the church riseth grey. 

Criticism may tell us that “the land” is an 
inadequate generalisation, that to say merely 
that it is “sweet” to be straying through it 
is to say nothing, that “the birds and the blos¬ 
soms and the beasts” are poetic counters, that 
“where all sorrow is heal’d”-is a sentimental 
cliche dragged in for purposes of rhyme, that 
“from township to township” makes no figure 
on the map, that “long was the day” is trite, 
and so on to its silly heart’s content. But if, 
when it has finished, it fails to perceive the 
living spirit of poetry in those stanzas of 
Morris’s, then we at least are not called upon 
to waste our energy in disputing the matter. 

Tennyson’s first book (excluding the Poems 
by Two Brothers) was published in 1830, 
Arnold’s in 1849, Rossetti’s in 1870, Morris’s 
in 1858, and Swinburne’s in 1860, although 
Atalanta in Cal yd on and Poems and Ballads , 
[133] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


by which volumes the character of his genius 
first fully asserted itself, did not appear until 
1865 and 1866 respectively. Rossetti was six 
years older than Morris and eight years older 
than Swinburne, but he kept his poems, though 
they were well known to his friends, unpub¬ 
lished in book-form for many years. Among 
them all, Swinburne, the youngest, is the most 
perplexing as a poet. Leaving the content mat¬ 
ter of his poetry for mention in the proper 
place, we find in his manner the apotheosis of 
the technique of an age, we might almost say 
of many ages. With a poetic scholarship as 
liberal as and more widely read than Arnold’s, 
an ear as sensitive to the harmonics of words 
as Tennyson’s, a gift of incantation as befumed 
as Rossetti’s, a sense of romantic story as poign¬ 
ant and of English landscape as tender and 
sparkling as was Morris’s, and a metrical virtu¬ 
osity that was unknown to any of them, or, in¬ 
deed, to any other English poet, Swinburne was, 
technically, at once the most unoriginal and 
the most accomplished of the great men of his 
age. Of the particular poetic beauty that we 
have examined in Arnold—the beauty of 
[134] 


TENNYSON S INFLUENCE 


“prophets and friends of God”—he had noth¬ 
ing; the spare enchantment of the seventeenth- 
century lyric was the one eminent grace in the 
stores of English poetry that he did not gather 
up to his own uses. He, again, went to the 
sources partly through Tennyson, and, remem¬ 
bering this, it would perhaps put the matter in 
a word to say that it would be a safe under¬ 
taking to match any particular excellence in 
Tennyson’s diction, or in that of any of the 
poets who were influenced in Tennyson’s direc¬ 
tion, with a corresponding excellence some¬ 
where to be found in the work of Swinburne. 

Sleep; and if life were bitter to thee, pardon, 

If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live; 
And to give thanks is good, and to forgive. 

Out of the mystic and the mournful garden 

Where all day through thine hands in barren braid 
Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade, 

Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey, 
Sweet smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted, 
Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that 
started, 

Shall death not bring us all as thee one day 
Among the days departed ? 

In a passage such as this, not considering the 

[ 135 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


nature of the content matter, and setting aside 
qualities in the style peculiar to Swinburne, 
there is clearly sounded in the actual writing 
the note that distinguished Victorian poetry 
from the poetry of earlier ages. The quality 
in this which is distinctively Swinburne’s own, 
as it is in the great body of his work, is one in 
which the effect of metrical movement, or more 
precisely the play of metrical movement upon 
diction, is more important than it commonly 
was in the verse of his contemporaries. As I 
have suggested earlier in this essay, the tech¬ 
nical originality of poetry by the time that 
Tennyson began to write, if not, indeed, before 
that, was to be sought rather in diction, the 
elements of which we have discussed, and in 
rhythmic currents moving along more or less 
established metrical channels, than in actual 
metrical invention. But Swinburne more than 
any other poet of his time calls for modification 
of this statement. To distinguish rhythmic 
beat from metrical pattern is difficult, perhaps 
impossible to do by any rule of thumb. But a 
careful examination of Swinburne’s verse as a 
whole reveals that, in comparison with poets of 
[136] 


Tennyson’s influence 

his own stature, he had little rhythmic sub¬ 
tlety, a diction that was superbly copious but 
seldom touched with the rarer magic of dis¬ 
covery, and a metrical genius that, in its power, 
its variety and its essential artistic significance, 
may be said without over-statement to remain 
beyond the approach of any other English poet. 
While most people would, I think, accept the 
generalisation without question, in so far as it 
concerns Swinburne’s diction, they might ques¬ 
tion it in respect of rhythm and metre. The 
average reader of poetry, whose business rightly 
is to enjoy what he is reading before coming 
to a close analysis of its nature, should he come 
to that at all, if asked what most struck him 
in Swinburne’s poetry would probably say that 
it was its rich and intoxicating rhythm. The 
trained critical mind, on the other hand, might 
assert that, masterly as Swinburne’s metrical 
performance was, it was hardly ever metrical 
invention. Both would be difficult to answer, 
and yet I think both might be persuaded. We 
have only to take any characteristic passage 
from one of the supreme creators of rhythmical 
life, such as Shakespeare and Milton and 

[137] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 

Wordsworth and Keats and Tennyson and 
Arnold, and to see how nervously the phrasing 
line runs through it, to realise how little of 
this line there is in Swinburne, and that the 
beat which rings so seductively or impressively 
in our ears from The Garden of Proserpine and 
The Forsaken Garden and the Atalanta choruses 
and a hundred other splendid poems, is really 
a metrical beat and not a rhythmical beat at 
all. And on the other hand, while it would be 
dangerous to say that any single metrical form 
used by Swinburne could not be shown to have 
its model in an older use, his metrical abun¬ 
dance and ingenuity are so great, the new com¬ 
binations he makes so many and fortunate, the 
effect he produces so incisive and unforgettable, 
that his use of metre may reasonably enough 
be allowed as an original achievement of genius. 
It is not difficult to support the whole position 
by a single poem or, indeed, by two stanzas of 
a single poem. 

Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear* 

Let us go hence together without fear; 

Keep silence now, for singing-time is over, 

And over all old things and all things dear. 

[138] 


Tennyson's influence 

She loves not you nor me as all we love her. 

Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear, 

She would not hear. 

Let us rise up and part; she will not know. 

Let us go seaward as the great winds go, 

Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here? 
There is no help, for all these things are so, 

And all the world is bitter as a tear. 

And how these things are, though ye strive to show. 
She would not know. . . . 

That is technically a sheer triumph of metrical 
skill. Of the rhythmic line of which we have 
spoken there is nothing. Of the finer enchant¬ 
ment of diction also there is nothing. In four¬ 
teen lines there are over a hundred monosyl¬ 
labic words, and it could hardly be claimed for 
one of them that it performs any magical 
evocation, such as do those words quoted of 
Vaughan and Marvell. The monosyllabic com¬ 
monplace of the diction is hardly redeemed by 
the few words that have some stock poetic asso¬ 
ciation, and the diction is, indeed, in itself as 
insignificant as the rhythm. And yet this is 
lovely verse, among the best work of a great 
poet, and its virtue comes from its exquisite 
[ 139 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


metrical authority. So pronounced is this that 
the absence of rhythmical vitality does not mat¬ 
ter, being made good by a metrical beauty that 
under this poet’s direction is in itself something 
as satisfying. And the poverty of the diction 
is no longer poverty, taking from the metrical 
genius of the verse all that it needs of colour 
and temperament. Swinburne’s characteristic 
contribution to the poetic technique of his age 
was to show that great verse could be produced 
without the greatest gifts of rhythm or dic¬ 
tion. He had an ear that was, in one sense, 
faultless, but it rarely caught the long haunting 
undertones of poetry that flow about the struc¬ 
ture of most great verse, and he could com¬ 
mand every device of verbal luxuriance with¬ 
out being able to penetrate to the last spiritual 
recesses of language. What, with all his 
powers, he lacked of greatness in these respects, 
he made good by his one unchallenged mastery. 
Since of the three elements of poetic technique, 
metre, rhythm and diction, metre is least in¬ 
scrutable in its nature, it followed that Swin¬ 
burne was at once fatally easy of imitation and 

[140] 


tennyson’s influence 


less influential than any of his peers upon the 
living tradition of English poetry. Dozens of 
poets have written very like Swinburne, but 
no poet has ever written better because of him. 


[ 141 ] 


Chapter VII 

Browning's Influence — R . H. Horne — 
Alfred Domett — T. E. Brown — 
Coventry Batmore 

S O much for the Tennysonian influence upon 
Victorian technique, and the questions 
arising from the work of poets who were sub¬ 
ject to, or part of, that influence. The manner 
which we have examined as being character¬ 
istically Browning’s made a far less marked im¬ 
pression upon the work of his age. It can 
hardly be said of any of the greater poets of the 
time that he wrote differently because of 
Browning’s example. There are notes in some 
of Morris’s early work in which we can detect 
a moment’s consciousness of the Browning 
idiom—in Sir Peter Harper’s End for instance 
—but it passed never to return, and is nowhere 
else to be found in the principal poets of the 
time, with one exception to be mentioned. 
[142] 


browning’s influence 

Browning’s influence upon later poetry is 
another matter, but not one for discussion here, 
where it must be sufficient to repeat that in the 
new vigour that came into English poetry after 
the perfumed dusk of the eighteen-nineties 1 
Browning is likely to be found by critical his¬ 
torians to have had a considerable hand. Of 
the less celebrated Victorian poets, who were 
yet in some measure an adornment of their age, 
three found in Browning’s technique a more 
constant inspiration to their own. These were 
Richard Hengist Horne, Alfred Domett and T. 
E. Brown. Horne was a strange figure in 
Victorian poetry who gets an obscure corner in 
the anthologies, and is otherwise forgotten save 
as a friend of the Brownings. But he was a 
poet of great ambitions, and of a good deal 
more achievement than we remember. His 
epic poem Orion , which attained much fame in 
its time, and some permanent notoriety as the 
Farthing Epic, so called because Horne, 
angered by public neglect when it first ap¬ 
peared, contemptuously had it sold at a farth- 

1 This, I need not say, is a very partial definition of a 
decade that was not exclusively represented by the sallow 
genius of an Ernest Dowson and an Aubrey Beardsley. 

[143] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


ing, is a very readable work for any one who 
cares to try it and is not afraid of poetry in 
long measure. Also he wrote many admirable 
short pieces, and his work as a whole only 
needed more of the discipline that would have 
kept him from sprawling in poetry to have 
given him a much wider reputation than he 
now enjoys. He was an older man than Brown¬ 
ing, having been born in 1803, but he lived a 
long working life of eighty years, and so far 
as he made his poetic mark in either direction 
it was rather in Browing’s than in Tennyson’s. 
The Tlough , justly the best known of his lyrics, 
has a kind of ungarlanded earthiness and an 
impetus in its conclusion that remind us rather 
of Browning’s robust method than of the more 
opulent tendencies of the age. 

Above yon sombre swell of land 

Thou seest the dawn’s grave orange hue, 
With one pale streak like yellow sand, 

And over that a vein of blue. 

The air is cold above the woods; 

All silent is the earth and sky, 

Except with his own lonely moods 
The blackbird holds a colloquy. 

[144] 


browning’s influence 

Over the broad hill creeps a beam, 

Like hope that gilds a good man’s brow; 

And now ascends the nostril-steam 
Of stalwart horses come to plough. 

Ye rigid Ploughmen, bear in mind 
Your labour is for future hours: 

Advance—spare not—nor look behind— 

Plough deep and straight with all your powers! 

Poetry was merely an occasional occupation 
to Alfred Domett; he was, nevertheless, pro¬ 
fessedly a disciple of Browning, who made him 
the Waring of the poem, a fact which gives 
him, perhaps, a moment’s factitious interest in 
a brief study of Victorian poetry. His poetic 
gift was real but slightly tended, and fell into 
neglect in a life of politics. His Flotsam and 
Jetsam , however, deserves some remembrance, 
and the following will serve to show that his 
discipleship to the great poet who was his 
friend was not wholly a vain one. 

INVISIBLE SIGHTS 

“So far away so long—and now 

Returned to England?—Come with me! 

Some of our great ‘celebrities’ 

You will be glad to see!” 


[ 145 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Carlyle—the Laureate—Browning— these! 

These walking bipeds—Nay, you joke!— 
Each wondrous power for thirty years 
O’er us head-downward folk 


Wrapt skylike, at the Antipodes,— 

Those common limbs—that common trunk! 

’Tis the Arab-Jinn who reached the clouds, 
Into his bottle shrunk. 

The flashing Mind—the boundless Soul 
We felt ubiquitous, that mash 
Medullary or cortical— 

That six-inch brain-cube!—Trash! 

The third of the poets mentioned, T. E. 
Brown, is of a wider popularity and a more 
distinguished talent than the others. His 
poems have remained in print and still find 
many readers, and the reputation of his best 
work is likely rather to be increased than 
diminished by time. A shy and scholarly figure, 
he was a good democrat in his poetry and wrote 
of humble lives without condescension and yet 
rather from a sympathetic seclusion than as a 
poet of the people. Perhaps his mind was the 
one of his generation in which Browning’s in- 
[ 146 ] 


browning’s influence 


fluence worked to most considerable purpose, 
though it would be at least as true to say in 
justice to a genuine but limited poet that his 
was a striking instance of a smaller poetic en¬ 
dowment working under the same technical 
instincts as the greater. In his work we find 
a rhapsodic note of lyricism, a sense of drama¬ 
tic antithesis, a fondness for elliptical argument, 
all of which are in Browning’s habit. Brown’s 
touch in his longer poems may not be as firm as 
the master’s, which is merely to say unneces¬ 
sarily that he was not as great a poet as Brown¬ 
ing, but in his shorter pieces he could often 
score a success in a manner that Browning him¬ 
self could hardly have used more effectively, in 
evidence of which Salve may be given. 


To live within a cave—it is most good; 

But, if God make a day. 

And some one come, and say, 

“Lo! I have gather’d faggots in the wood!” 
E’en let him stay, 

And light a fire, and fan a temporal mood! 

So sit till morning! when the light is grown 
That he the path can read, 

Then bid the man God-speed! 

[ 147 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


His morning is not thine: yet must thou own 
They have a cheerful warmth—those ashes on the 
stone. 

The single exception that has been men¬ 
tioned to the generalization, that Browning had 
little effect upon the work of his greater con¬ 
temporaries, is Coventry Patmore. Of all the 
great poets of his time he has hitherto been by 
far the least generally understood and appre¬ 
ciated. His most celebrated poem, The Angel 
in the House , is full of material that lends 
itself easily to light censure, and, however ten¬ 
derly the poem may be lit by intermittent 
beauties, it must be allowed that the general 
scheme is, on the whole, at least a poetic indis¬ 
cretion, which in the case of so ambitious a 
structure is to write down failure. But the 
Patmore of the Odes is another matter, and 
here we have a poet who can find his company 
only among the greatest of his time. And the 
manner of these Odes is one of great range and 
variety, not at all the range and variety of a 
facile imitative gift, but notably of original 
poetic invention. It may, in view of his rela¬ 
tive reputation, and, indeed, of his relative 
[ 148 ] 


browning’s influence 

stature, sound a preposterous thing to say, and 
I admit that I say it only to stress an argument, 
but if the work of a single poet alone had to be 
chosen to survive in witness of the genius of 
Victorian poetry in its many aspects, a by 
no means frivolous case might be made for 
Patmore’s claim. It is true that many aspects 
of the age’s genius would then be recorded in 
something a little short of their finest manifes¬ 
tation, though others could hardly ask for more 
authoritative witness. But in no one poet are the 
several aspects assembled at so representative a 
level of expression. The pressure of Patmore’s 
individual poetic energy was not so great as 
that of Tennyson or Browning, hardly as that 
of Morris or Arnold or Swinburne. His spir¬ 
itual insight at its most intense was as revealing 
as that of any poet of his or, indeed, of any 
age, but in his poetic life he did not dwell as 
habitually at the centre of creative energy as 
those his great contemporaries. There was too 
often something occasional in his work, not in 
the mere choice of subject, but in his imagina¬ 
tive relation to the subject when chosen, to 
allow him poetic constancy of the first order. 

[ 149 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


And that is, perhaps, on the whole, the reason 
why, advancing as his reputation continues to 
be in the best critical opinion, it is, and is 
likely to remain, a little below that of the 
highest of his time. While this is so, however, 
it is also true that there was very little in the 
manifold achievement of Victorian poetry that 
Patmore did not at some time or another come 
to by the entirely personal movement of his 
own genius. This copiousness in his talent was 
a thing quite distinct from Swinburne’s sublime 
virtuosity, more lonely in its origin and much 
more far-reaching in its influence. 

One of the most remarkable poetic affinities 
of recent times is to be found between the 
genius of Francis Thompson and that of Alice 
Meynell. However much these two poets may 
have resembled each other in spiritual tempera¬ 
ment no two could differ more decidedly in 
poetic method. Thompson, whose manner is 
piled up in magnificence, exuberant in trailing 
and intricate imagery, drenched with every per¬ 
fume and stained with every dye that he can 
extract from language at the very pitch of 
[ 150 ] 


browning’s influence 

eloquence, is in his diction the flushed and 
almost breathless consummation of all the more 
luxuriant tendencies in Victorian verse. Alice 
Meynell, on the other hand, with her diction so 
chaste and disciplined and exact, her imagery so 
frugal and unadorned, is a rarefied incarnation 
of the grave magic that the genius of Matthew 
Arnold had caught from the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury, a century which in so far as it worked upon 
Thompson did so rather in its florid ecstasy. 
And yet the poet from whom both Thompson 
and Alice Meynell derived more clearly than 
any other among the Victorians was Patmore, 
and it was no doubt a consciousness that they 
inherited widely divergent strains from a com¬ 
mon parentage that accounted in some measure, 
at least, for their responsiveness to each other, 
not merely in sympathetic appreciation, but in 
their essential poetic natures. For Patmore, 
too, knew the seventeenth century, and more 
consciously than did any other poet of his time, 
and he knew it both in its serene logical en¬ 
chantment and in its almost demoniac spiritual 
fervour. He wore both manners with a Victo- 

[ 151 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


rian difference, but he could wear them and 
independently of each other. Of the first this 
is an example —Vesica Piscis . 

In strenuous hope I wrought, 

And hope seem’d still betray’d; 

Lastly I said, 

“I have labour’d through the Night, nor yet 
Have taken aught; 

But at Thy word I will again cast forth the net!” 

And, lo, I caught 

(Oh, quite unlike and quite beyond my thought,) 
Not the quick, shining harvest of the Sea, 

For food, my wish, 

But Thee! 

Then, hiding even in me, 

As hid was Simon’s coin within the fish, 

Thou sigh’st, with joy, “Be dumb, 

Or speak but of forgotten things to far-off times to 
come.” 


And of the second, this— 

O Death, too tardy with thy hope intense 
Of kisses close beyond conceit of sense; 

O Life, too liberal, while to take her hand 
Is more of hope than heart can understand; 
Perturb my golden patience not with joy, 
Nor, through a wish, profane 

[ 152 ] 


browning’s influence 

The peace that should pertain 

To him who does by her attraction move. 

Had all not been before? 

One day’s controlled hope, and one again, 

And then the third, and ye shall have the rein, 

O Life, Death, Terror, Love! 

But soon let your unrestful rapture cease, 

Ye flaming Ethers thin, 

Condensing till the abiding sweetness win 
One sweet drop more; 

One sweet drop more in the measureless increase 
Of honied peace. 

These are not seventeenth-century verse, but 
they are striking examples of Victorian verse 
worked upon by two main influences from the 
seventeenth century, and they bring Patmore 
representatively into line on the one hand with 
the “florid and flowing schemes” of Tennyson, 
and on the other with the “stiff er movement 
and graver tones” of Arnold. And that out¬ 
side both these he was also subject to the 
instincts of Browning’s characteristic manner 
the following poem will show. 

A woman is a foreign land, 

Of which, though there he settle young, 

A man will ne’er quite understand 
The customs, politics and tongue. 

[ 153 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


The foolish hie them poste-haste thro’, 

See fashions odd and prospects fair, 
Learn of the language How d'ye do? 

And go and brag they have been there. 
The most for leave to trade apply 
For once at Empire’s seat, her heart, 
Then get what knowledge ear and eye 
Glean chancewise in the life-long mart. 
And certain others, few and fit, 

Attach them to the Court and see 
The Country’s best, its accent hit, 

And partly sound its Polity. 


[ 154 ] 


Chapter VIII 

Conclusion of Part I 

I N the scheme of the present study no more 
need be said of the technical side of Vic¬ 
torian poetry, nor need anything at all be said 
of such specific matters of technique as rhyme, 
syllabic equivalence, stanzaic structure, or pro¬ 
sodic abstractions, beyond to remark that in all 
these things, although there is an infinite vari¬ 
ety of practice, the Victorian age added little 
that was essential to the history of English 
poetry. Perhaps, indeed, it was inevitable, and 
in no wise to be regretted, that it should add 
nothing. Further, to examine the rhythmic 
achievement of the age would be to examine 
at length the work of each individual poet, even 
to present a complete edition of each individ¬ 
ual poet’s works, since the rhythmic life of each 
poet is at once as individual and as incalculable 
as are the gait and gesture of a man. It has 
been my purpose, rather, to consider the many 

[ 155 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


tendencies that display themselves in the dic¬ 
tion of Victorian poetry, since in and through 
these can be most clearly marked the distin¬ 
guishing characteristics of any poetic age. In 
doing this I have necessarily sometimes fore¬ 
shadowed what there will be to say in the later 
part of this study, where the content matter of 
Victorian poetry will be considered, and where 
some poets will be dealt with whom it did not 
not seem necessary to mention at this earlier 
stage of the argument. What cannot be told 
of the technical characteristics of Victorian 
poetry from the examples of Tennyson and 
Browning and those other poets that we have 
considered cannot be told at all. 


[ 156 ] 


Part II: THE MATERIAL OF 
VICTORIAN POETRY 


Part II: THE MATERIAL OF VIC¬ 
TORIAN POETRY 


Chapter I 

Intellectual Fashions 

N OTHING is easier than for one age to 
be shallow and arrogant about the 
spiritual and intellectual preoccupation of 
another. To active minds, even the most cyni¬ 
cal among them, life is such an urgent and 
absorbing business, so desperately charged with 
significance, that it is easy enough to suppose 
that contemporary methods of approach to it 
are the only wisely chosen ones, and this par¬ 
ticularly in contrast with those of an imme¬ 
diately preceding age. I do not know that any 
critic of to-day thinks that Homer was a liar or 
a fool because he believed, or professed to be¬ 
lieve, in the hierarchy of Zeus and the enchant¬ 
ment of the Sirens, or complains that Shake¬ 
speare was a credulous ghostmonger, or that 
[ 159 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Shelley, in holding that the world could be 
satisfactorily governed by a quixotic political 
idealism, was only a little less inept than 
Machiavelli, who thought that it could be re¬ 
deemed by political craft. We find no diffi¬ 
culty in accepting Homer and Shakespeare 
(who, by the way, is just as likely to have 
actually believed in the appearance of ghosts 
as not, and who made fairies real, when most 
modern writers can do nothing but make them 
silly) on their own terms in their relation to 
life. If we understand the functions of poetry 
we are not the less moved by Milton’s descrip¬ 
tion of the creation of the world because we no 
longer believe that it happened in that way, 
and I suppose there would be none among us 
found with temerity enough to suggest that 
Milton himself did not believe it and that he 
was setting his story down idly without con¬ 
viction. In all these instances we are willing 
to admit that it is not the creed that matters, 
but the faith and passion with which it is held, 
and we will allow the poets any conclusions 
they like so long as we are persuaded of their 
own imaginative good faith/And yet this gener- 
[ 160 ] 


INTELLECTUAL FASHIONS 


osity is not always found when the conclusions 
happen to be those of an age against which 
our own lives are partly passed in reaction, and 
many honest critics who would call Homer 
neither liar nor fool are misled into calling 
Tennyson both. 

Among Victorian poets Tennyson is at the 
centre of a philosophic life against which the 
intellectual habit of our own time is often in 
active opposition. This being so, much may 
be excused to the excesses of self-interest, and 
we can make some allowance, for example, for 
a current mood that thinks it rather indelicate 
to speak about mere goodness, when it repri¬ 
mands a mood of yesterday that thought good¬ 
ness a very simple and natural thing to talk 
about. But to make allowances for it is not 
to approve it, and it is about time for us to 
stop making ourselves ridiculous by talking 
about the great Victorians as though they were 
lost in a fog of superstition and prudery and 
moral timidity . 1 We need not debase our- 

1 Mr. Harold Nicolson’s recently published book on Ten¬ 
nyson illustrates my point. The book is an acute and, in 
nearly every respect, a sympathetic piece of thinking, but 
it is coloured by the circumstance, due to the reaction of 

[ 161 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


selves before them, but, also, we need not talk 
as though the dawn of intellectual candour had 
broken somewhere about 1900. It is all really 
such a little matter, the difference, just a change 
of deportment, that is all. At many modern 
tables, if you should speak of goodness every¬ 
body blushes or simpers, if, indeed, there is not 
some very bold spirit to rebuke you openly. 
But if you speak of the other thing every one 
is happily at ease and you realise how fear¬ 
lessly we to-day are facing the truth about life. 
At our grandmothers’ table it was different. 
The freedom of to-day would have caused con¬ 
sternation there, but our own inhibitions would 
have been unintelligible. There have been loss 
and gain in both ways, and the balance remains 
about the same. After all, it is just as unac- 

which I have spoken, that Mr. Nicolson often thinks Ten¬ 
nyson intellectually very little apples. And in this respect 
—in this respect alone—he patronises Tennyson, and the 
result is unfortunate, not for Tennyson but for Mr. Nicol¬ 
son. It really will not do to say that Tennyson was an 
exquisite lyric poet but a blundering old prig intellectually. 
Tennyson’s intellectual approach and expression were not 
Mr. Nicolson’s, and it is perfectly right for Mr. Nicolson 
to stand for his own. But he should have remembered that 
Tennyson was not only the lyrist that he admits him to 
be, but, when all is said and done, a giant among the minds 
of a remarkable age. Had he done this he would not have 
marred what is otherwise a very beautiful piece of critical 
exposition- 

[ 162 ] 


INTELLECTUAL FASHIONS 

countable to be discomposed by Tennyson when 
he makes Galahad say 

My strength is as the strength of ten 
Because my heart is pure. . . . 

as it is to be discomposed by Mr. Masefield 
when he makes Saul Kane say 

I’ll bloody him a bloody fix, 

I’ll bloody burn his bloody ricks. . . . 

In this study of the substance of Victorian 
poetry, therefore, we will dismiss at once any 
suggestion that we are dealing with a period 
of intellectual adversity. Tennyson and the 
group of poets who represented in some degree 
or another Tennyson’s mood were neither 
keener nor duller in the wits than the poets of 
other ages, and since we go to poetry not for 
what we can learn from it, but for an invigora- 
tion of the mind towards the establishment of 
our own learning, it need not trouble us that 
Tennyson’s point of view happened in many 
ways to be one that is peculiarly antipathetic 
to our own. 


[ 163 ] 


Chapter II 


Subjective and Objective Poetry — Nar¬ 
rative Poetry — Macaulay—Morris 
—Poetic Drama 

HERE would seem to be two different 



A kinds of material upon which the poetic 
faculty can be employed. The old distinction 
of subjective and objective has become loose in 
usage, as is the fate of all definitions, but it is 
not a bad one for working purposes. If in the 
discussion of aesthetics we begin to qualify our 
definitions too exactly we are apt to finish up 
in a world of unintelligible refinements. 
Words when used in argument have not the 
same quality and should not be expected to 
perform the same functions as they do in poetry, 
qualities and functions the nature of which has 
already been suggested. All modern moralis¬ 
ing, for example, has tended towards the rejec¬ 
tion of such plain words as good and bad. We 


[ 164 ] 


SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE POETRY 

no longer speak of a good man and a bad man 
as the Old Testament and Bunyan did, and we 
can show very good reasons for the rejection. 
Psychology has taught us that it is quite unsafe 
to call any one just good or bad and leave it at 
that, ancf it is one of the achievements of 
modern literary art, particularly in the drama 
and in fiction, to explore with great subtlety 
the gradations by which good and bad merge 
into each other in a single character. Never¬ 
theless, after such analysis has exhausted itself 
with every ingenuity, there remain the words 
good and bad, and in the ordinary communica¬ 
tion of ideas we do know, with more or less 
precision, what is meant when some one of 
normal intelligence tells us that so and so is 
a good man or a bad man. And so with such 
words as objective and subjective in the con¬ 
sideration of aesthetics. It is perfectly true to 
say that no subject matter controlled by a 
poet’s art can ever be wholly one or the other, 
but it is also true to say that if a narrative 
poem like The Lay of the Last Minstrel is 
spoken of as being objective in nature, and a 
philosophical self-analysis like The Prelude as 
[ 165 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


being subjective, we know clearly enough what 
is meant. If we go further and say that in a 
work such as King Lear we get the two natures 
perfectly combined in one organism, we are 
still talking without wilful obscurity, and we 
are explaining in a rough and ready way, and 
yet in a way that is, perhaps, as good as any 
other, why it is that a work like King Lear 
shows poetry in its highest and most compre¬ 
hensive exercise. It is not that Tine Lay of the 
Last Minstrel , in presenting a graphic pageant 
of life external to Scott’s own personal experi¬ 
ence, has nothing of that experience woven into 
it, nor is it that The Prelude in its constant con¬ 
cern with Wordsworth’s own spiritual processes 
has no observation towers that look out on to 
the open road. But the external pageantry on 
the one hand and the self-analysis on the other 
are quite clearly the predominant motives of 
the respective poems, just as they are perfectly 
mated in King Lear , where there is at once 
everything of the vivid perception of a de¬ 
tached life that can be found in Scott, and 
everything of deep spiritual responsibility that 
can be found in Wordsworth, the one now 
[ 166 ] 


SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE POETRY 

transfigured by passion and the other lit by a 
new imaginative variety. With so much defi¬ 
nition, therefore, the terms subjective and 
objective may be used for our present purposes. 

Scott’s poems are the best examples in Eng¬ 
lish of poetry that is purely, or almost purely, 
objective. And the neglect of more recent 
criticism has, I suspect, left them still in the 
possession of the affections of many readers. 
They are not only the best of their kind, they 
could not very well be better. The finer nar¬ 
rative art of Chaucer, suffused as it was by a 
much more personal contact with its content 
matter, stands really in aesthetic significance, 
apart from the question of individual genius, 
with the art that produced King Lear. In the 
Victorian age the art of Scott found its inheri¬ 
tors, and, although the schoolmasters have done 
their best to kill The Lays of Ancient Rome , 
Macaulay was no bad practitioner in a kind of 
which we are foolish to speak slightingly 
because it does not happen to be the highest. 
If we can forget the class-room and put preju¬ 
dice aside, and keep our sense of values clear, 
there is something amiss with us if we do not 
[ 167 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


thrill to passages, of which there are many in 
the Lays , such as 

Then out spake brave Horatius, 

The Captain of the Gate: 

“To every man upon this earth 
Death cometh soon or late. 

And how can man die better 
Than facing fearful odds, 

For the ashes of his fathers, 

And the temples of his Gods, . . 


Alone stood brave Horatius, 

But constant still in mind; 

Thrice thirty thousand foes before, 
And the broad flood behind. 

“Down with him!” cried false Sextus, 
With a smile on his pale face, 

“Now yield thee,” cried Lars Porsena, 
“Now yield thee to our grace.” 

Round turned he, as not deigning 
Those craven ranks to see; 

Nought spake he to Lars Porsena, 

To Sextus nought spake he; 

But he saw on Palatinus 

The white porch of his home; 

And he spake to the noble river 
That rolls by the towers of Rome. 

[ 168 ] 


SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE POETRY 

“Oh, Tiber! father Tiber! 

To whom the Romans pray, 

A Roman’s life, a Roman’s arms, 

Take thou in charge this day!” 

So he spake, and speaking sheathed 
The good sword by his side, 

And with his harness on his back, 

Plunged headlong in the tide. . . . 

Macaulay was not by habit or any deep artistic 
intention a poet at all, and the Lays are little 
more than spirited footnotes to his history, a 
point aptly made by Professor Hugh Walker 
in his scholarly study of Victorian literature, 
but as such they are the work of a very vivid 
talent and have a secure if humble place among 
the memorable poetry of their age. There is 
no work of the time exactly comparable to 
Macaulay’s unless it be that of William 
Edmondstoune Aytoun, but the Lays of the 
Scottish Cavaliers , far from being without 
merit though they are, have no special charac¬ 
teristics that call for mention here. 

All the greater poets of the age tried their 
hand at some time or another at objective nar¬ 
rative verse, but Morris alone among them 
made narrative a chief concern of his art. The 
[ 169 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Life and Death of Jason , The Earthly Paradise 
and Sigurd the Volsung ,* together make up a 
body of narrative poetry by virtue of which it 
would be difficult to call Morris in this kind 
the inferior of any one but Chaucer. Morris 
had not Chaucer’s sense of character, nor his 
humour, nor, perhaps, the variety of his inven¬ 
tion, but in pure narrative gift, the art of keep¬ 
ing the reader’s attention fixed upon the prog¬ 
ress of a long story, it is doubtful whether he 
is to be placed even below Chaucer himself. 
It is, however, when we call to mind that 
quality in Chaucer which, I have suggested, 
gives his art something of the comprehensive¬ 
ness that is supremely achieved in King Lear , 
that we feel Morris, great poet though he was, 
to have been definitely the less considerable 
man of the two. Morris loved the world of 
his invention, and loved it passionately, but 
his narrative poetry is not quite authoritatively 
marked by his own spiritual agonies and exul¬ 
tations. In speaking of so noble a poet, and 
one so rich in pleasure-giving, one would say 

1 It is unnecessary here to discuss the claim that would 
place Sigurd in the region of epic. 

[ 170 ] 


SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE POETRY 

nothing that should savour at any distance of 
disparagement. Nor is Morris to be belittled 
because Chaucer was his master, not only by 
example, but by achievement. At the same 
time, in Morris’s narrative poetry, however 
splendidly it may compel every other honour, 
there is to those who love it a perplexing some¬ 
thing which leaves it short of the very highest. 
In a strange and impalpable way it seems as 
though he had withheld some last heart-beat 
from its creation. His claim, frequently made, 
that the writing of poetry was easy is not with¬ 
out some symbolic significance. It may have 
been that Morris was too happy a man to be 
quite among the very greatest poets. His verse 
stories leave us with a feeling that he is not 
utterly exhausted after the act of creation, that 
the figures of his invention, tender and virile 
though they are, remain outside the inner secre¬ 
cies of his own emotion. There is, in fact, a 
larger preponderance of exclusively objective 
intention in his work than in Chaucer’s, and by 
so much he means the less in the final poetic 
reckoning. This is not to forget that, by com¬ 
parison with any narrative poet other than 
[ 171 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Chaucer, Morris’s work is flooded with subjec¬ 
tive passion, far beyond that of Macaulay or 
of Scott himself. In the earlier part of this 
study I have suggested that Morris really lived 
in the world of his stories more actually than 
in the nineteenth century, and that is, I think, 
the truth. But his capacity for imaginative life 
at all, immense though it was, had always just 
a strain of decorative facility that marked it a 
little apart from the constant imaginative pres¬ 
sure that we And in Chaucer. Morris told us 
magnificent stories, very moving and quick with 
heroic life, and to read them is to pass into a 
world of living and significant romance. But, 
remembering our own mortality, he has not the 
touch of revelation that was so easily Chaucer’s, 
not quite the same breath of apocalyptic love. 

The narrative work of the other great Vic¬ 
torian poets hardly calls for special consider¬ 
ation, being incidental to and of a part with 
their normal practice, not the result, as with 
Morris, of a specific artistic plan. But at this 
point a word may be said of the many dramas 
that were written during the age, in which we 
should expect from the nature of this form 
[ 172 ] 


SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE POETRY 

something of that unification which has been 
referred to in what has been said about Chaucer 
and King hear. The Victorian poets as play¬ 
wrights, and they nearly all tried their hands 
at the craft, suffered from the radical disability 
of having no living theatre in which to learn 
their craft and in which to see their invention 
come to full embodiment. This is not the 
place to discuss the reasons why it came about, 
but the fact remains that when Tennyson began 
to write the English theatre had long since 
driven out the spirit of poetry, and continued to 
enforce the exile during the whole of his long 
life. The waste of energy incurred by Tenny¬ 
son and Browning and Morris and Swinburne 
and Arnold, not to name a number of less cele¬ 
brated men, in the writing of plays (of the 
succession of poets preceding them the same 
thing could be said) is one of the tragic futili¬ 
ties both of English literature and of the Eng¬ 
lish theatre. It was a time when the actor had 
achieved complete ascendency in the theatre 
and when what he wanted was, not creative 
poets whose works he could perform, but hack 
playwrights who could serve the purpose of his 

[ 173 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


own histrionic virtuosity. No more of this 
need be said here, but the list of Victorian 
plays written by men of great poetic gifts is 
a pathetic witness of the indomitable aspira¬ 
tions of the English genius towards drama 
and of the shameless indifference through long 
periods of the theatre towards those aspira¬ 
tions. What these men might have done in a 
fortunate theatre cannot be said, but in view 
of the very imperfect evidence available it 
would be quite unsafe to say of any one of 
them that he had not the gifts that would have 
served a great theatre greatly. In the event, 
their dramas were, for the most part, little more 
than elaborated lyrics thrown arbitrarily into 
an inert dramatic form. That is to say, lacking 
the theatre, and the formative influence of the 
theatre, the objective quality which is the first 
essential of drama never came into full play at 
all. Shakespeare, as I suggested above, was a 
skilled playwright because he had this objec¬ 
tive faculty in a measure only equalled, per¬ 
haps, by Homer, and a great playwright be¬ 
cause he impregnated it with a subjective sense 
of equal supremacy. But, whereas it needs a 
[ 174 ] 


SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE POETRY 

subjective sense to make a great drama, drama 
of sorts can come to a kind of life in the theatre 
through the objective faculty alone, while 
without the objective faculty you cannot have 
drama which will hold the stage at all. And 
it was the opportunity to develop that objec¬ 
tive sense in dramatic terms that was denied the 
poetic genius of the Victorian age, as it had 
been denied the poetic genius since the passing 
of the Restoration comedies. So that anything 
that is worth saying about the drama of the 
Victorian poets will be covered by the consider¬ 
ation of their poetry in general, and we may 
dismiss the specifically dramatic intention in it. 


[ 175 ] 


Chapter III 

“The Idylls of the King”—Tennysott s 
Critics—His Method—A Debatable 
Element in Tennyson s Work — 
Moral Judgment in Poetry — Ten¬ 
nyson's Public Authority 

T HE point of attack chosen by most of 
Tennyson’s detractors is the Idylls of the 
King. Detraction is ultimately a very incon¬ 
siderable force in the world, being exposed 
readily enough by the minds that know any¬ 
thing of the thing against which it is directed, 
and being of no consequence either way in its 
action on minds that know nothing of it. 
People who really read Tennyson can readily 
enough rebut the unthinking and often envious 
charges that are made against him, while it 
does not matter what effect these may have 
upon the people who do not read him at all. 
There is, nevertheless, in the evolution of a 
poet’s reputation the necessary sifting from 
time to time of the evidence and a revaluation 

[ 176 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


of the old judgments. The reaction against 
Tennyson that set in, as with all poets, for a 
period after his death, discovered many faults 
in his work which clearly enough were faults, 
but it has allowed these far too great an impor¬ 
tance in the general estimate of his poetry. 

The common opinion, even the common crit¬ 
ical opinion of some authority, that has been 
expressed in recent years about the Idylls of 
the King is a striking instance of this lack of 
balance and generosity. In the first place, we 
have been told over and over again that Tenny¬ 
son emasculated Malory, that the new poet’s 
Arthur was a Victorian gentleman reflecting 
the stiff glories and virtues of the Prince Con¬ 
sort’s train, not the fiery warrior with a vigor¬ 
ous paganism shining through his Christian 
professions that lives in the pages of the old 
chronicler, and that the ladies of the Idylls 
have become stultified by the proprieties of a 
later court than Guinevere’s. Setting aside the 
sneer implied by the use of the figure of Vic¬ 
torian gentility, a sneer that really bears far 
less examination than its agents may suppose, 
the charge is a true one, but it is difficult to see 
[ 177 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


why it should be held to be very damaging to 
Tennyson. It may be readily allowed that his 
world, his sense of character, and his ideals of 
conduct, were not precisely, or even approxi¬ 
mately, those of Malory, but I am not aware 
that he ever claimed that they were, or that in 
using the figures of Arthurian legend he was 
not as entirely justified in making his own 
interpretation as Malory had been in his own 
time in making his. Nothing is sillier in criti¬ 
cism than to come to an artist’s presentation of 
a legendary, a romantic, or even an historical 
figure with an already fixed idea of what that 
presentation should be. The evidence about 
these things in almost every case leaves the 
way open to a dozen conclusions, any one of 
which may carry conviction so long as the 
artist is capable of creative singleness of heart. 
We are really impertinent if we demand that 
Tennyson should make of Arthur and Enid 
and Geraint and Lancelot and Guinevere and 
Merlin and Vivien something that squares with 
our anterior impressions gathered from Malory. 
All we are justified in demanding is that Ten¬ 
nyson shall give them life which would con- 
[ 178 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


vince us of its reality had we never heard of 
them before. If it be argued that in that case 
Tennyson might just as well have invented a 
personnel of his own, the answer is that the 
poet since the beginning has always, and justly, 
felt himself to be at liberty to draw upon the 
common stock of legend and history so that he 
may profit by the appeal made by a familiar 
setting and invest his creation with the elemen¬ 
tal vitality that comes from association. When 
the Greek audiences went to see a new tragedy 
by one of their masters they knew beforehand 
that they would be shown a dramatis person& 
with whose existence they were already famil¬ 
iar, and so the poet started off with the advan¬ 
tage of having an audience that took it for 
granted that the people of his play were really 
alive. But the gain carried with it for him 
no obligations, or, at least, none that he would 
not as a matter of course instinctively fulfil. 
That is to say, provided he did not positively 
turn the accepted tradition inside out he was 
not only allowed to make what new reading of 
it he liked, but he was actually expected by his 
audience to do this. And so it was with Tenny- 
[ 179 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


son in his Idylls. Had he made Arthur a lech¬ 
erous bandit, or Enid a nagging vixen, or 
Lancelot a saintly anchorite, or Guinevere an 
evil light-of-love, then we could have com¬ 
plained with justice that he should have found 
other names for his creations. But he did none 
of these things. In their central nature the 
figures of his Idylls retain the essential char¬ 
acteristics that had belonged to them from the 
legends of the old days, and it is only in his 
modifications of these, often, it may be readily 
admitted, emphatic in character, that Tennyson 
reflected his own instincts and the spirit of his 
age. 

To acknowledge the fitness of those modifi¬ 
cations is as much the obligation of fair criti¬ 
cism as it is not to overstate them. It is true 
that every now and again we get a line or a 
phrase touched by the fashion of the moment 
that now seems a little grotesque to us, in the 
same way that at our particular range of time 
the bonnets and antimacassars of our grand¬ 
mothers seem a little grotesque . 1 But in them- 

1 It is interesting to hear that the dealers are anticipating 
the moment when such things will become criterions of 
taste for the dilettante. Warehouses are being stocked for 

[ 180 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


selves these touches are not really odd, but only 
twigs, as it were, that have lost their sap in 
the larger spread of timber, as will happen in 
every permanent body of poetry. When we 
read that Geraint withheld punishment from 
the dwarf through “pure nobility of tempera¬ 
ment,” that he was “a little vext at losing at 
the hunt,” when we hear that Vivien in her 
dissembling put on the appearance of “a vir¬ 
tuous gentlewoman deeply wrong’d” we may 
be amused for a moment. But the then current 
idiom of chivalry was not really any more ab¬ 
surd than the more ancient one of false traitors 
and perfect knights and fair damsels, and, in 
any case, we lose our sense of proportion if on 
the strength of it we make a commotion about 
Tennyson’s intellectual provincialism. These 
things, when they are all of them accounted for 
in his work, amount to the merest accident of 
an occasional gesture in the whole general bear¬ 
ing of the man, and in some kind, if not pre¬ 
cisely in that kind, they can be matched in 
every poet. With more claim to attention than 

the new demand that may arise at any moment for rooms 
adorned by horsehair furniture. 

[ 181 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


these trivialities are lines something of the same 
kind but of a deeper purport, such as those 
when Merlin speaks of the king as 

O true and tender! O my liege and king! 

O selfless man and stainless gentleman. . . . 

“Stainless gentleman” has a certain poetic flat¬ 
ness to our ears which it had not for Tennyson 
and his readers. To-day it is not supposed to 
be good form to speak about a man being a 
gentleman at all, and democracy no longer en¬ 
courages us to think about a man being a 
gentleman at all. We are all now (at least we 
all may be) nature’s gentlemen, and much may 
be said for the doctrine. Tennyson was part of 
a society where the aristocratic distinction was 
not merely a reality in fact, but one acknowl¬ 
edged intellectually, and the more we see of the 
world the less certain can we be that any one 
stage in social development is demonstrably 
better than another. “Change is the law of life 
on earth,” says Mr. Gosse, and each generation 
may suppose that the change is for the better, 
though one may to-day, for example, meet very 
liberal-minded and generous people who can 
[ 182 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


make out a very good case for a return to 
feudalism. But we can cut the argument short 
by saying that when Tennyson (or Merlin) 
spoke of Arthur as being a “stainless gentle¬ 
man” he was being neither a prig nor a syco¬ 
phant. He might sing that 

Kind hearts are more than coronets, 

And simple faith than Norman blood. . . • 

but there was also room in his scheme of things 
for the specific distinction that saved 

O true and tender! O my liege and king! 

O selfless man and stainless gentleman. . . . 

from being merely tautological. And if it 
comes to that, Tennyson here was nearer than 
some of his critics to the spirit of Malory. It 
is well enough to be of our time in matters of 
social faith and use the world as we find it. 
To be doctrinaire in politics is mostly to be 
futile, but habits of expediency which are bred 
by trying to make the best of social schemes at 
the moment should be dropped when we turn 
to the criticism of poetry. 

[ 183 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


If we dismiss these petty difficulties of man¬ 
ner, we shall find that in their main construc¬ 
tion the Idylls present a life which is very 
unlike that which is suggested by their de¬ 
tractors. The ansemic and Gilbertian curates 
and schoolmarms who are supposed to people 
the poems in a pleasant Sunday afternoon at¬ 
mosphere have no being at all when we come 
to examine the poems themselves. Taking 
Tennyson by himself, without reference to 
Malory or any other source, we may surmise 
that the men of the poems, the very Galahad 
and Lancelot and Bedivere and Geraint of Ten¬ 
nyson’s creation, that is to say, would have dis¬ 
played a decision of character and a strength of 
arm that would shake some of the long-eared 
critics out of their complacency and perhaps 
afford them a little wholesome exercise. And 
if any one thinks that he could behave by any 
but the strict rules of chivalry in the presence of 
Tennyson’s Guinevere there is something amiss 
with his schooling. If no better evidence can 
be advanced for Victorian effeminacy and 
prudery and coxcombry than the Idylls of the 
King the charge must go by the board. Finally, 
[ 184 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


in this respect we need hardly defend Tennyson 
because he sometimes chooses to point a moral 
as well as to adorn a tale, as when in the mid¬ 
dle of the Enid story he breaks off with 

O purblind race of miserable men, 

How many among us at this very hour 
Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, 

By taking true for false, or false for true; 

Here, thro’ the feeble twilight of this world 
Groping, how many, until we pass and reach 
That other, where we see as we are seen. . . . 

This practice has always been and will always 
remain a prerogative of poetry and it is not 
purism but frivolity of intellect that objects to 
it. 

The actual poetic achievement of the Idylls 
is very great. That as a group they have no 
architectural unity is true, but they have never 
professed such unity. As separate stories they 
are graphically, and often very poignantly 
told, with innumerable touches of great felicity. 
They are pervaded by Tennyson’s descriptive 
gift and yet it is always closely woven into 
the imaginative texture and hardly ever in- 
[ 185 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


dulged (as it was often by even so great a poet 
as Swinburne, for example) for its own sake. 
When Geraint comes to the town of the spar¬ 
row-hawk where 

In a long valley, on one side of which, 

White from the mason’s hand, a fortress rose; 
And on one side a castle in decay, 

Beyond a bridge that spann’d a dry ravine: 

And out of town and valley came a noise 
As of a broad brook o’er a shingly bed 
Brawling, or like a clamour of the rooks 
At distance, ere they settle for the night. . . . 

the fortress is not merely an effective piece of 
decoration in the poem but part of its essential 
life, just as in the shoal 

Of darting fish, that on a summer morn 

Adown the crystal dykes at Camelot 

Come slipping o’er their shadows on the sand. . . . 

and when Geraint rides 

into the castle court, 

His charger trampling many a prickly star 
Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones. . . . 


the image is hardly less at the centre of things 

[ 186 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


than Shelley’s superb “blue thistles bloomed 
in cities,” of which it is inevitably, but finely, 
reminiscent. Geraint’s splendid challenge to 
Edyrn’s labourers, beginning “A hundred pips 
eat up your sparrow-hawk,” Yniol’s beautiful 
iteration of the refrain in Enid’s song, “Our 
hoard is little but our hearts are great,” Lance¬ 
lot’s discovery to Lavaine on their approach to 
Camelot, “Hear, but hold my name Hidden, 
you ride with Lancelot of the Lake,” are but 
casual instances of the abounding poetic energy 
that informs the poems. Nor are there want¬ 
ing yet greater triumphs of the imagination, 
things at the very heart of poetic mastery. 
Geraint’s self-imposed penance never to ask 
Enid the significance of the accusation which 
he supposed he had heard her make against 
herself is a master-stroke of vision of which the 
dramatic genius of Shakespeare himself might 
have been proud, while I know of no moment 
in all English poetry more surging with the 
tides of tragic and heroic beauty than that in 
which the great Arthurian epic comes to its 
close, with the throwing of Excalibur back into 
the Cornish water. 


[ 187 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


So flash’d and fell the brand Excalibur: 

But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm 
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, 

And caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him 
Three times, and drew him under in the mere. . . . 


The power of visualisation here is tremendous. 
The lines are charged with a mystery that has 
in it nothing that is inexact or nebulous, and 
we see not an enchanted pool of a romantic 
wonderland, but an actual water by the rock- 
bound Cornish coast, the heart of a country 
where was played out the immortal drama of 
England’s legendary chivalry. Here is the 
beauty that transcends the beauty of pathos, 
the beauty of trembling and poignant vision 
such as we find in some great chorus of Eurip¬ 
ides. By the evidence of such things, which 
are not seldom within Tennyson’s reach, it is a 
very lean and jealous humour of criticism that 
can deny him a place among even the greatest. 

A more debatable element in Tennyson’s 
work may also be illustrated from the Idylls . 
When Arthur takes his last leave of Guinevere 
at the Almesbury convent he follows a touching 
recital of the founding and the character of the 
[ 188 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


Round Table with an uncompromising indict- 
ment of Guinevere’s sin. He announced sepa¬ 
ration as the only possible course to be taken 
in spite of his professions of indestructible love, 
and the assurance in which, perhaps, may be 
found just a grain of comfort for the detractors, 
“Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God forgives.” 
Guinevere accepts the impeachment and its con¬ 
sequences and in turn renounces her allegiance 
to Lancelot, not only in her life but in her 
heart, and the crux of the argument may be 
given in this passage from the king’s parting 
charge— 

“How sad it were for Arthur, should he live, 

To sit once more within his lonely hall, 

And miss the wonted number of my knights, 

And miss to hear high talk of noble deeds 
As in the golden days before thy sin. 

For which of us, who might be left, could speak 
Of the pure heart, nor seem to glance at thee 
And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk 
Thy shadow still would glide from room to room, 
And I should evermore be vext with thee 
In hanging robe or vacant ornament, 

Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair, 

For think not, tho’ thou wouldst not love thy lord, 
Thy lord has wholly lost his love for thee. 

[ 189 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


I am not made of so slight elements. 

Yet must I leave thee, woman, to thy shame. 

I hold that man the worst of public foes 
Who either for his own or children’s sake, 

To save his blood from scandal, lets the wife 
Whom he knows false, abide and rule the house: 

For being thro’ his cowardice allow’d 
Her station, taken everywhere for pure, 

She like a new disease, unknown to men, 

Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd, 

Makes wicked lightnings of her eyes, and saps 
The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse 
With devil’s leaps, and poisons half the young. 
Worst of the worst were that man he that reigns! 
Better the King’s waste hearth and aching heart 
Than thou reseated in thy place of light, 

The mockery of my people, and their bane.” 

This is a long instance to set out but it will 
serve, not only for the immediate purpose of 
discussion, but as a text for more general con¬ 
sideration of a prevalent attitude in Victorian 
poetry of which Tennyson was the chief exem¬ 
plar. When every allowance has been made for 
dramatic detachment, we cannot but suppose 
that the passage quoted embodies a belief to 
which Tennyson himself would have subscribed, 
and it is difficult to get away from the feeling 
that there is something radically unsound in it. 
[ 190 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


Every spectator of Othello must have felt the 
impulse to leap on to the stage and cry upon 
Othello to come to his senses and realise that 
even if he cannot see that he is being fooled by 
a villain he should at least sit down and have 
the matter out with Desdemona. By his end 
Othello becomes a noble and heroic figure, but, 
even allowing that he discovers in the action 
what seem to him to be sufficient grounds for 
the cruellest of his suspicions, we can never feel 
in the body itself of the play that his jealousy 
is anything but contemptible. Had Shake¬ 
speare’s method been different, and had he con¬ 
cealed the truth from us as he does from 
Othello, or had our opinion inclined towards 
Desdemona’s guilt until the final revelation, 
we could still not but have felt that she was 
tolerable company at least compared with her 
termagant and demoniac husband. But Shake¬ 
speare saw that Othello was an immensely at¬ 
tractive figure as an expression of life, without 
for a moment insisting that he was an admira¬ 
ble figure on the less elementary and yet in a 
sense lower plane of conduct. That is to say, 
Shakespeare could worship the nature in 
[ 191 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Othello as he could worship all vivid life, and 
he could present the moral limitations of that 
nature with the deepest sympathy, even without 
any implication of blame, but he was never in 
danger of confusing them with moral virtues. 
So far as there is any deliberate doctrine to be 
found in Shakespeare’s art, indeed, the jealousy 
of Othello, even though it had been proved to 
be as well founded as he himself supposed, is 
shown to have been as disastrous in its tragic 
destruction of character as the blood-guilty am¬ 
bition of Macbeth or the drunken passion of 
Antony. But Tennyson, although he was 
vitally interested in life, and honest enough in 
his acceptance of the processes of life so far as 
he could interpret them, had also certain ab¬ 
stract moral points of view which he was apt 
to impose upon those processes in the course of 
creation. In this there is a difference between 
the artistic purposes of the two poets, a dif¬ 
ference that had really been slowly asserting 
itself in English poetry from the end of the 
Shakespearean era until Tennyson’s time. It 
is a difference that on the whole must definitely 
mark the later poetry as less unadulterated in 
[ 192 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


its creative aims than the earlier, and it is a 
difference, further, that has led to grave mis¬ 
conceptions in the modern practice of the art . 1 
It may be worth while to analyse this difference 
a little more closely. 

It is clearly a mistake to suppose that moral 
judgment did not come within Shakespeare’s 
scheme. Every one of his plays from the dark 
and terrible pity of Lear to the light and gra¬ 
cious revelry of Twelfth Night is charged with 
moral judgment, but it is a judgment that is 
strictly complementary to the action of the 
characters within the play, and as organically a 
concern of the poet’s creative function in the 
play as are the characters and action themselves. 
In other words, the moral judgment becomes 
inevitably a part of life itself, and is an alto¬ 
gether profounder thing than a merely abstract 
moral point of view. And this, indeed, is one 
of the chief glories of Shakespeare’s art, as of 
the whole poetry of his age, that it is intensely 
concerned with life, with its moral conse¬ 
quences, but it is hardly at all concerned with 

1 That is to say, by causing a reaction that supposes it 
to be outside poetry’s function to have any moral purpose 
whatever. 

[ 193 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


moral points of view that are not directly the 
consequence of life as it grows at the poet’s bid¬ 
ding. That is why we feel that Shakespeare 
loved Macbeth, whose moral conduct he must 
have condemned, no less than Rosalind, whose 
conduct he as certainly sanctioned. Both were 
a part of the life to which he brought the con¬ 
stant homage of genius, and although that 
genius could not but award disaster to one and 
happy honour to the other, there was no pre¬ 
fixed moral rule to be applied with a conse¬ 
quent alienation of affection in the one case 
and establishment of it in the other before the 
final reckoning was made. So soon after 
Shakespeare as Milton the difference begins to 
show itself. The explicit purpose of Paradise 
Lost , a purpose happily not too constantly kept 
in mind, is “to justify the ways of God to 
men,” and with this implication that a stand¬ 
ard has to be set up from the first whereby a 
man can be shown to be morally at fault and 
wilfully to have disobeyed rules laid down for 
his guidance, the abstract moral point of view 
is beginning to assert itself, and although Mil- 
ton’s art is sublime enough to make the disa- 
[ 194 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


bility of little account in the result, there is 
something less universal in the creative mood. 
Shakespeare gives us life, moulded to a tem¬ 
perament, it is true, but untrammelled by any 
other control, while Milton gives us life, still 
moulded to a temperament, but also beyond 
that tested in some measure by a morality that 
is intellectually fixed, and in seeking to justify 
the ways of God—God being only another 
word for that morality—Milton inevitably 
fails to justify humanity as Shakespeare so tri¬ 
umphantly does. In imagination, and fertility, 
and rhetorical invention, and constructive 
grandeur, and even in passionate realisation, 
Milton cannot be placed below Shakespeare 
himself, but in understanding he is below him, 
and this because he did not come to life with a 
mind so open. By the time we have come from 
Milton to Pope the difference is emphasised. 
Shakespeare created, and his creations carried 
their own doom with them. Milton created, 
and his creations then had to be judged by a 
morality that was held outside the terms of 
their own being, as it were, and the integrity of 
the art was a little less exact in consequence. 

[ 195 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


But the morality was one in which Milton did 
passionately believe; he would have gone to 
the stake for it, as many brave men did go to 
the stake. Pope, too, had a moral belief by 
which the creations of his poetry had to be 
judged, but there would have been no going to 
the stake for Pope in its defence. The intel¬ 
lectual passion of Milton had become an intel¬ 
lectual attitude in Pope, and, since men make 
far more fuss about their attitudes than their 
passions, Pope allowed his belief far more un¬ 
disciplined play in his poetry than Milton had 
done. Milton moralised like the prophets of 
old, but Pope moralised like a modern school¬ 
man. This is not to say that Pope in the proc¬ 
ess did not often achieve very good poetry, and 
he sometimes touched truth more profoundly, 
perhaps, than he knew. But when he tells us 
“whatever is is right” we are sure that he is 
making an extremely effective verse while we 
are not so sure that he is speaking out of his 
heart and not merely playing up to the philo¬ 
sophic exercises of Bolingbroke. 

With Wordsworth the difference persists, 
but it has shifted its centre. His moral sin- 
[ 196 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 

cerity is no more in doubt than Milton’s, and* 
indeed, his artistic control of moral judgment 
may be said to approach Shakespeare’s more 
nearly than does Milton’s. Between Shake¬ 
speare and Wordsworth, however, there still 
remains a great difference. Wordsworth, al¬ 
though subject to abstract moral convictions 
much more clearly than Shakespeare, is yet 
as unwilling as the great dramatist to im¬ 
pose them on his creations after the event, 
but the difference lies in the fact that with 
Wordsworth the whole substance of his crea¬ 
tion is far more limited in range than Shake¬ 
speare’s, and precisely because it is from the 
first conditioned largely by the moral con¬ 
viction. That is to say that, without any de¬ 
liberate manipulating of his art, Wordsworth 
by instinct brought into his poetry only the 
kind of creations that were not by their actual 
conduct, but in their essential character, in 
keeping with his own moral nature. The cre¬ 
ative impulse led Shakespeare no one could 
tell from hour to hour in w T hat direction, and 
it was never hampered in its movement by the 
poet’s own moral point of view. Milton’s im- 
[ 197 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


pulse, also, could range far, but the issue, what¬ 
ever it might be, had to be tested by the same 
laws in the end. With Pope, the administra¬ 
tion of the laws had become a more or less arbi¬ 
trary ceremony, very self-important as such 
ceremonies are, and too often divorced from 
the figures of any creative impulse at all. But 
with Wordsworth the impulse never worked 
happily outside the influence of the moral na¬ 
ture by which its creations were ultimately to 
be tried. And so, leaving Pope out of the 
reckoning, since in these high matters, memor¬ 
able poet as he was, he was of altogether 
smaller stature, we may say that in the fitness 
of the exercise of moral judgment Wordsworth 
stands with Shakespeare, but that, his creation 
being governed largely by a moral character al¬ 
ready defined, instead of developing its own 
moral influences as it grows, it is infinitely less 
various and complex than Shakespeare’s, while 
Milton approaches Shakespeare more nearly in 
range, but is less impressive than either in his 
adjustment of poetic to moral values. 

We find, then, that Shakespeare was pro¬ 
foundly interested in an immense range of life 
[ 198 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


and not at all in moral points of view, that 
Milton was interested in a range of life still 
immense though less variously peopled, and 
also passionately interested in moral points of 
view, and that Wordsworth was as vitally con¬ 
cerned with a range of life far more limited, < 
the very nature of which, however, absolved 
him from the necessity of consciously applying 
a moral point of view which had already been 
allowed for by his art. In considering Tenny¬ 
son’s position in this matter we have to remem¬ 
ber first that he was one of the very few great 
English poets that have come to a very wide 
popularity in, their own time. Shakespeare 
was popular, so far as the records of the thea¬ 
tre of his day tell us anything, but he was popu¬ 
lar because he told a good dramatic story on 
the stage and satisfied the needs of theatre 
audiences. The moral grandeur with which he 
invested his plays would in its absence no doubt 
have left them far less powerful in their con¬ 
temporary appeal, but it was not by this gran¬ 
deur that primarily he achieved his popularity. 
Milton was not popular in his own lifetime at 
all, and Wordsworth, although he secured gen- 
[ 199 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


eral fame before his death, was never a voice 
for which the multitude waited. Dryden and 
Pope had great reputations in their time, but 
it was rather among an exclusive and small lit¬ 
erary society than among the masses. Byron 
caught the general ear by his gift of pure ro¬ 
mantic narrative, but he and Scott in their time 
were satisfying the demand for good stories, 
which has since produced the immense crop of 
modern fiction. But Tennyson was in a dif¬ 
ferent case from all of these. Here was a poet 
who was impressing, as no other poet in Eng¬ 
land had ever done before, his moral and 
philosophic views upon all sorts and conditions 
of men, and this without using the great circu¬ 
lating medium of the theatre or beguiling with 
a tale. The time was not one of any deeper 
intellectual or spiritual life than any other, 
but one in which that life was more diverse 
in its interests. Whether the educational and 
scientific and industrial developments that were 
going forward have been for good or bad in the 
welfare of the community may be doubted, but 
there is no question that they were stimulating 
the average mentality of the country to a fresh 
[ 200 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


activity. Religious and philosophic specula¬ 
tion, the adjustment of scientific discovery to 
faith, the economics of the new order, and the 
precise significance of the growing Imperial 
idea, these and other questions were the daily 
concern of the man in the street, and disputa¬ 
tion was the common practice of nearly every 
hearthside. Perplexity followed on perplexity, 
and they were perplexities not only of private 
spiritual experience, but of public passion also. 
And upon these Tennyson’s judgment was 
awaited with an unparalleled eagerness. Apart 
from the interest in his poetic genius, in the 
shaping power with which his art embodied his 
experience, there was a far-reaching concern 
with the actual nature of his conclusions. The 
poet was a prophet in the land, with an au¬ 
thority that he had not known since the old 
bardic days. Queues would form at the book¬ 
shops at the early hours of the morning on 
days when a new volume by him was to be pub¬ 
lished. And this touching faith in a poet’s 
word was not held only by the simple-minded 
and bewildered generality who wanted ready¬ 
made solutions for their problems. It was 
[ 201 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


shared by working men and the great leaders 
of science, by shrewd and liberal scholars and 
by unlettered adolescents, by the country squire 
and the stump orator, by Calvinistic church¬ 
men and free-thinkers, by poets and the new 
Utilitarians, by the Queen and the village 
pump, in short by all sorts and conditions of 
men. When we remember how representative 
an audience it was to which Tennyson spoke 
we need hardly do more than this to realise 
that the charge that has sometimes been made 
against him of intellectual shallowness or char¬ 
latanry is a very ill-considered one. A reli¬ 
gious or intellectual impostor may catch the 
easy ear of a credulous public for a moment, 
pack revival halls, or become a best seller, but 
a following that included Jowett and Huxley 
and Rossetti and FitzGerald and Francis Pal- 
grave and Butler of Trinity, Gladstone and 
Disraeli, General Gordon and J. R. Green, 
George Eliot and Stopford Brooke and Thack¬ 
eray and Tindall, not only as exceptional but 
as representative figures, was neither easy nor 
credulous, and when the last word of carica¬ 
ture about Tennyson and his mantle has been 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 

said the fact remains that in direct doctrine, 
as apart from the subtler processes of poetry, he 
had an influence upon the finest minds of his 
age which can hardly be exaggerated. He was 
an acknowledged as well as an unacknowledged 
legislator. 

This does not often happen to a poet, and, 
while we may be glad that now and again the 
old office of poetry in the daily counsels of the 
people should be renewed, it is well that in the 
general run of things this should be so. Noth¬ 
ing is more likely to turn a poet’s head than 
to be accepted as an oracle, and it must be al¬ 
lowed that it turned Tennyson’s head a little. 
His was too fine a nature for the effects to be 
very serious, and Mr. Nicolson is inclined to 
overstate the case when he talks of Tennyson’s 
acumen in trimming his sails to every fresh 
wind. The truth is that the business of poetry 
and of ordered philosophy are distinct things, 
and while many of us think that in the end 
poetry has the more persuasive voice of the 
two, as she certainly has the more charming, it 
is not very good for her to be flattered into the 
belief that she can use both at will. And Ten- 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


nyson was so flattered. The moral judgment, 
the function of which in Shakespeare’s art, and 
Milton’s and Wordsworth’s, we have discussed, 
became with Tennyson as independent a pre¬ 
occupation as it had been with Pope, but with 
Tennyson it was at once much more serious and 
much more sincere and less witty in nature, 
and, in its divorcement from poetry, much more 
dangerous in consequence of this. This is by 
no means to say that Tennyson’s moral pieces 
are never good poetry or that they are not very 
often durably convincing in their morality, but 
it is to say that he would often impose upon his 
poetry a moral judgment that was not a pas¬ 
sionate one like Milton’s or a sententiously dia¬ 
lectical one like Pope’s, but an almost official 
one held with all the solemnity of official re¬ 
sponsibility, and gathered as much from the 
abstract public opinion to which he in turn 
ministered as from his own brooding conviction. 
To say that Tennyson was dishonest in this is 
to say something that should not be said about 
so rare a poet and so single-hearted a man. It 
is not even as though the moral judgment to 
[ 204 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


which he committed himself was ever one of 
which he could not quite sincerely say that he 
approved, and in further extenuation it must 
be remembered that, after all the talk about the 
waste tissue in Tennyson’s work which came 
from his concern in this way with ephemeral 
moods and institutions, there is on actual exam¬ 
ination very little of his poetry which makes 
wholly unprofitable reading to-day. But the 
trouble so far as it went was, it may be, that 
Tennyson was tempted into confusing moral 
opinions about particular things with a presid¬ 
ing moral judgment and to introduce these into 
a poetical context where they had no proper 
place. Milton’s moral nature could assert it¬ 
self over and above his poetical creation, and 
in so far as that was so he could be said to in¬ 
dulge a moral point of view in a way that made 
his sense of artistic fitness a little less fine than 
Shakespeare’s. But Tennyson went beyond 
this, and not only allowed moral points of view 
sometimes to become the chief concern of 
poetry, in the manner of Pope, though Tenny¬ 
son did it far more impressively, but he was 
[ 205 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


also capable of allowing the pressure of moral 
points of view to lower the passion of his poetic 
creation in a way that Milton never did. 

So it is that that passage at the end of Guine¬ 
vere is fundamentally a betrayal of the very 
beautiful poetic life into which it intrudes. 
The moral point of view expressed is not only 
not inevitably Arthur’s, that is to say, not an 
organic part of the poetry, it is not even a moral 
judgment pronounced by the poet upon his cre¬ 
ation at the bidding of a vast natural impetus 
such as directed Milton in his judgments. 
Plainly the passage is introduced because Ten¬ 
nyson remembers that these views about con¬ 
jugal fidelity are likely on the whole to be well 
received by the great audience that is waiting 
for him. That they would, in fact, be so re¬ 
ceived, that they were in keeping with responsi¬ 
ble opinion in the fabric of society, and that 
they are, however successfully they may some¬ 
times be challenged, a comfortable doctrine in 
the expediency of our modern life with much 
to be said for it, that they are, in short, moral 
views of some considerable authority, are not 
sufficient excuses for Tennyson’s misapplication 
[ 206 ] 


TENNYSON AND HIS AGE 


of them. The point is that, in a passage such 
as that given, Tennyson was accepting a rule- 
of-thumb morality from the social currency and 
not only passing it off as a moral judgment 
welling up from the deeps of poetic creation, 
but deceiving himself into the belief that it 
was this. It was, in effect, very much the sort 
of thing that Pope had done, only Pope's 
shrewd common sense kept him nearer to the 
fundamentals of moral doctrine and saved him 
from the false evangelical fervours that Ten¬ 
nyson was apt to catch from the public congre¬ 
gations above which he was so popular a figure. 
A congregation is, in fact, always a dangerous 
venue for a poet, since even a congregation of 
Jowetts and FitzGeralds cannot be wholly 
clear of the demoralising atmosphere of the 
revivalist meeting. It comes to this, that when 
Tennyson wrote that passage, although no 
doubt in argument he would have hotly de¬ 
fended the position advanced, he did not be¬ 
lieve what he was saying with the full force 
of poetic conviction, and in consequence he 
marred a poem in which, for the rest, is an idyl¬ 
lic tenderness, set against an heroic background 

[ 207 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


with perfect imaginative mastery. And the 
chief defect in Tennyson’s poetry as a whole 
may be found to be of this nature. The flaws 
in In Memoriam , for example, one of the 
noblest elegiac poems in the language, nearly 
all have this common origin. The defect is 
very nearly the sum of the charge to be made 
again Tennyson’s poetry, and it leaves the great 
body of his achievement but very little impov¬ 
erished in character. 


[ 208 ] 


Chapter IV 

The Range of Subject Matter in Vic¬ 
torian Poetry—The Occasional Ele¬ 
ment — Mrs . Browning — Christina 
Rossetti — FitzGerald — Spiritual 
Ecstasy 


T HIS element in the management of the 
poetic function, which sometimes in Ten¬ 
nyson became a weakness, was one which left its 
traces upon the volume of Victorian poetry as 
a whole. It was, indeed, not a sudden phe¬ 
nomenon specifically of that age, since it had 
been gradually asserting itself in English 
poetry for some generations, but it now became 
for a considerable time an established part of 
the tradition. That is to say, the interests of 
poetry generally, although it was impossible for 
them to explore more deeply the fundamentals 
of human nature than had been done in the 
past, had by now become far more various in 
their operations than they had been. The 
great Victorian poets could achieve no more of 
[ 209 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


significant revelation than Shakespeare and 
Milton and Wordsworth, but they did, as it 
happened, deal in their poetry with a wider 
range of interests. The actual subjects chosen 
by the Victorians for poetic treatment far ex¬ 
ceeded in number the subjects that had been so 
chosen in any age before. One might put it 
crudely and say that Tennyson and Browning 
and Arnold, and some of the others, wrote about 
every subject under the sun. Tennyson is re¬ 
ported to have told a friend that he would 
have written the Ode in praise of Wellington, 
with all its political and imperial preoccupa¬ 
tions, quite independently of the claims of his 
function as laureate. A Colonial Exhibition, 
the latest step in the theory of evolution, the 
progress of the feminist movement, a marriage 
in the royal family, these things could move his 
emotions with hardly less authenticity than the 
eternal exultations and desires that were for 
him, as they had been immemorially, the sub¬ 
ject-matter of poetry. When we remember 
what vast tracts of even that common ground 
had in different ages been left almost wholly 
unexplored by poetry, we realise more fully 
[ 210 ] 


THE RANGE OF VICTORIAN SUBJECT MATTER 

the catholicity of interest which now called it. 
The great age of the Elizabethan lyric, for ex¬ 
ample, hardly touched the resources of nature as 
material for poetry, while with the age of Pope 
love poetry passed with the last artificialities of 
the later Carolines into almost complete silence 
for a generation. And, again, for a period of 
over a hundred years, between the death of 
Vaughan and the coming of William Blake, the 
note of religious mysticism, with the exception 
of Christopher Smart’s one ecstatic moment, 
almost goes out of English poetry altogether. 
If, remembering these things, we then turn our 
minds to the Victorians, and have a sense of 
their poetic mood, we at once realise that it 
would have been almost inconceivable that any 
one of them should have failed in the course of 
his usual practice to write a great deal about 
all these things, nature and love and religion, 
and we find, in fact, that each one of them did 
so. But in going beyond these and kindred 
subjects, as they habitually did, to more specific 
and local interests for their inspiration, they 
became, in a sense that no group of masters 
had been before, occasional poets. 

[ 211 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


It was fortunate that they brought to their 
office as such the best of their qualities, and did 
not reserve these alone for the inspirations 
more accredited by tradition, so that occa¬ 
sional poetry, in the Victorian age, very often 
became great poetry. In reading the poetry 
of no other age do we so often feel that a poet 
of first-rate endowment has, as it were, been 
hunting about for a subject. Occasional poetry 
conceived and carried out in the great manner 
had hitherto been almost wholly confined to per¬ 
sonal addresses of compliment or condolence, 
and fustian as these mostly were there had been 
very noble exceptions. But with the Victorians 
the occasions were unconfined, and any one of 
the poets might at any moment produce a mem¬ 
orable poem, as it seemed, upon something that 
might catch his eye in the morning paper. If, 
by way of illustration, we were to take the 
titles of a hundred of Donne’s poems and set 
them beside the titles of a hundred of Brown¬ 
ing’s, we should find that in external range the 
one would be, as it were, a small green isle and 
the other a very archipelago. I need not la¬ 
bour the point that this does not at all suggest 
[ 212 ] 


THE RANGE OF VICTORIAN SUBJECT MATTER 

that Browning was a greater poet than Donne; 
it merely emphasises the fact that Browning’s 
age was far less concentrated in its poetic at¬ 
tentions than was Donne’s. The result of 
which was that Victorian poetry, with all its 
great central merits, all its loyal assertation of 
the eternal elements, acquired a certain scat¬ 
tered character, a certain disorder in bulk, that 
leaves the essential spirit of this age a little 
more than commonly difficult to come at. 

A further result was that a good deal of 
Victorian work is of a lowered significance 
when set beside work of corresponding emi¬ 
nence in other ages. The moments of artistic 
surrender such as we find playing havoc with 
Tennyson’s poetry in such a passage as that 
given by Guinevere were not uncommon in the 
work of the age, though they often came in an¬ 
other and less disastrous aspect. The arbitrari¬ 
ness that so often governed—or left ungov¬ 
erned—the Victorian choice of subject, could 
not but sometimes bring about a relation of 
something less than the highest imaginative 
urgency between the poet and the occasion of 
his verse. In the general run of poetic practice 

[ 213 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


this did not necessarily mean an entire failure 
of the spirit nor a total absence of enchant¬ 
ment, but it did more often than not make the 
thing created seem to be less inevitably an ad¬ 
dition to the riches of English poetry. A great 
deal of the work of so admirable a poet as 
Mrs. Browning, for example, is heavily marked 
by this condition. Setting aside her obvious 
but unimportant technical deficiencies, we find 
in reading one long piece of hers after another 
that it “hath all the good gifts of nature” ex¬ 
cept indisputable evidence of its original neces¬ 
sity. A poem such as An Island sparkles with 
tender and expressive imagery— 

For all this island’s creature-full 
(Kept happy not by halves), 

Mild cows that at the vine-wreaths pull, 

Then low back at their calves 
With tender lowings, to approve 
The warm mouths milking them for love. 

Free gamesome horses, antelopes, 

And harmless leaping leopards, 

And buffaloes upon the slopes, 

And sheep unruled by shepherds; 

Hares, lizards, hedgehogs, badgers, mice, 

Snakes, squirrels, frogs, and butterflies. 

• [ 214 ] 


THE RANGE OF VICTORIAN SUBJECT MATTER 

And birds that live there in a crowd, 

Horned owls, rapt nightingales, 

Larks bold with heaven, and peacocks proud, 
Self-sphered in those grand tails; 

All creatures glad and safe, I deem. 

No guns nor springes in my dream! 

And yet the whole has something of the char¬ 
acter of a despatch from a divinely gifted spe¬ 
cial correspondent. And the same thing may be 
said sometimes even of so spiritually immacu¬ 
late a writer as Christina Rossetti. Goblin 
Market is a masterpiece, conceived out of a 
lovely nature and flawlessly executed, but if 
our minds go from it to Drayton or Her¬ 
rick, with whom it has some affinity, we are 
aware not of a surer touch in the older poets 
but of a stricter visitation. Under the Rose , a 
triumph of delicately controlled power, has, 
very elusively here, the same suggestion of 
something occasional in its character. Perhaps 
the most notable instance of all is Edward Fitz¬ 
Gerald’s Rubaiyat , x and here we are on deli¬ 
cate ground, since we are speaking of not only 

1 1 speak of this poem as though it were FitzGerald’s 
original composition, without reference to Omar, which for 
essential purposes it is. 

[ 215 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


one of the most celebrated poems of the age, 
but of one of the most remarkable. At first 
thought it might seem that of no poet could it 
less justifiably be said that in his principal life- 
work he was allowing any occasional or even 
any external influence to play upon his creative 
mood. Fastidious in judgment, of lonely in¬ 
tellectual pursuits, having not the slightest re¬ 
gard for contemporary fame, indolent rather 
than eager in creation and, far from seeking 
occasion for poetry, relieved when he could 
pass it by, as he generally could, and wholly 
unconscious of anything like a mission, Fitz¬ 
Gerald might well have been the last poet in 
whom to look for the accidental quality of 
which we are speaking. And yet it is this ac¬ 
cidental quality that keeps his Rubaiyat , so rich 
in memorable excellence, so splendidly con¬ 
trived and so often universal in its nature, from 
being among the very greatest moral poems in 
the language. The circumstance that it took 
its form from FitzGerald’s Oriental studies and 
is Persian in its machinery is of no consequence; 
Shakespeare was equally Shakespeare in the 
Roman world and mediaeval legend and his 
[ 216 ] 


THE RANGE OF VICTORIAN SUBJECT MATTER 

modern England, and as much might be said 
for Morris in FitzGerald’s own time. Here 
was a poem that was essentially religious in 
character—that its doctrine was one of agnos¬ 
tic hedonism notwithstanding. For such a 
poem to come to the highest achievement pos¬ 
sible to its kind, the first indispensable condi¬ 
tion is an uncompromising faith, and this is 
what Fitzgerald had not even in his own dolce 
far niente. There had once in English poetry 
been an age of faith, and there had once 
been an age of reason, but FitzGerald was of 
an age in which faith and reason were, in the 
life of the nation, for the moment inextricably 
confused, and when poetry addressed itself to 
rhapsodical belief—or unbelief if you will—as 
it did in the Rubaiyat , the seductions of reason 
were ever-present and the fervour of confession 
was embarrassed by the insinuations of argu¬ 
ment. This did not much matter in In Me - 
moriam or in the great part of Browning’s work 
that was religious in texture, because here spec¬ 
ulation was, for good or ill, very largely the ex¬ 
plicit province of the poetry. But FitzGerald’s 
design was not speculation, it was disclosure, 
[ 217 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


and when this is so poetry should breathe the 
spirit of the labourer addressing his wife, “I’m 
not arguin’, I’m a-tellin’ of yer.” If the reader 
should think it worth while, for comparative 
purposes, to turn up a forgotten but splendid 
poem, Memorials of Mortality , by Joshua Syl¬ 
vester , 1 he will find an admirable example of 
faith in somewhat lugubrious but trumpet- 
toned poetic assertion. There is no arguing 
in Sylvester, it is all rhetorical and solemn rev¬ 
elation, wholly indifferent to its audience and 
unconscious of the possibility of denial. With 
FitzGerald there is an undertone always of 
anxiety to carry opinion with him, very in¬ 
definite in expression and yet present clearly 
enough if our attention is close. We do not 
complain about it; to do so would be at once 
foolish and ungenerous. But we are aware of 
it and we know that it is in some subtle way, 
and perhaps unconsciously, a concession to a 
mood of the time, which, as we have seen, was 
a little antagonistic to the most commanding 
kind of poetic fulfilment. When we read— 

1 1563-1618, the translator of. du Bartas, and a prolific 
poet known to most readers by one lovely sonnet, but other¬ 
wise neglected far beyond his desert. 

[ 218 ] 


THE RANGE OF VICTORIAN SUBJECT MATTER 

’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days 
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays : 

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, 
And one by one back in the Closet lays. 

The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes, 

But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes; 

And He that toss’d Thee down into the Field, 

He knows about it all—He knows—HE knows! 

we cannot but admire the masterly, indeed the 
unforgettable way in which the philosophic po¬ 
sition is set forth, nor can we deny that the 
statement is fairly within the terms of poetry. 
But in such notes as this, which are frequent 
in the Rubaiyat , we detect a certain faltering 
in imaginative faith, not precisely in intellec¬ 
tual conviction about the creed which is being 
expounded, but in the spiritual exaltation that 
may lift any creed, whether it be sacramental 
and beatific as in Crashaw’s St. Theresa , or 
stoic as in Emily Bronte’s Last Lines , or in¬ 
scrutably naturalistic as in Mr. Ralph Hodg¬ 
son’s Song of Honour , above the regions of de¬ 
bate to the very pinnacle of authority. When 
all these reservations have been made, there is 
enough virtue and to spare iii Victorian poetry 
[ 219 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


to leave it written as a new and glorious chap¬ 
ter in the most national of our arts, nor can 
spiritual ecstasy itself be wholly denied it, as 
Dost Thou Not Care? and many other poems 
by Christina Rossetti, Tennyson’s Crossing the 
Bar , Browning’s Prospice , and, dark though its 
conclusions be, Arnold’s Dover Beach , and Mrs. 
Browning’s Weeping Saviour , and Coventry 
Patmore’s Vesica Piscis , to name half a dozen 
poems at a venture, can testify. But, consid¬ 
ering the manifestations of poetry in that age 
as a whole, spiritual ecstasy was one of its least 
constant achievements. 


[220] 


Chapter V 

Love Foe try and the Victorian Use of 
Nature 

I N nothing did the Victorian genius justify it¬ 
self more fully than in its love poetry. Love, 
a theme which, apart from the Augustan silence 
which was broken only by such stray produc¬ 
tions as James Hammond’s Love Elegies, has 
been constant in English lyric poetry, had never 
before been sung at one time with so many in¬ 
dividual accents. In the poetry of speculative 
thought and religion the Victorian disintegra¬ 
tion of mind may have led to a certain flut¬ 
tered insecurity, a lack of the superb moral 
poise which distinguishes the Greek and the 
Miltonic epochs for example, when, no matter 
how individual the poet, the rules as to what 
was and what was not the proper material of 
poetry had some authority. It was not insig¬ 
nificant that whereas Browning, we feel, could 
pick up the subject for a long philosophic poem 
in a morning’s walk, Milton took twenty years 
[ 221 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


to deliberate his choice. But in love poetry the 
advantage, by the same conditions, was with 
the Victorians. The law about the matter 
would seem to have a strange streak of paradox 
in its nature. To take speculative religion and 
love as contrasting themes by way of illustra¬ 
tion, it would appear that since speculative re¬ 
ligion is a thing about which at no time can 
there be any sort of standard or finality in the 
human mind, it is on the whole better for the 
purposes of art that some such standard arbi¬ 
trarily fixed should be commonly accepted. On 
the other hand, since love is a thing about 
which in its actual nature there is little or no 
change from age to age as between one man 
and another, it profits art when individual in¬ 
terpretations of love are as wide as possible 
in their variety. The Greek drama, the high 
noon of Italian painting, the seventeenth-cen¬ 
tury devotional school of English lyric, all 
these gained enormously in impressiveness be¬ 
cause in the creation of each of them there was 
present to every artist a more or less fixed cen¬ 
tral authority which he recognised as being 
greater than any he could set up by his own un- 
[ 222 ] 


VICTORIAN LOVE POETRY 


aided meditation. But in love the individual’s 
authority is as great as any common authority 
can be, since love itself, as apart from thought 
about love, is the same in its essential nature, 
whatever measure of that nature may be given, 
to one man as to another, and so there is gain 
when that thought about love, as distinguished 
from love itself, is allowed the utmost freedom; 
and in this freedom the Victorian age in poetry 
is more personal than any that had preceded it. 
If we consider love poetry as a whole we shall 
find but an extremely small part of it is con¬ 
cerned with the fundamental ecstasy of love 
itself, with the adoration of the lover for the 
beloved in terms of ordinary experience and 
not modified by special circumstance as it was, 
for example, with Dante, and when it is so con¬ 
cerned it necessarily changes hardly at all ex¬ 
cept in verbal idiom from age to age. Love 
poetry, for the most part, is concerned not with 
love itself but with the lover’s attitude to¬ 
wards and contemplation of his love, in fact, 
not with love so much as with thought about 
love. And this thought about love from age 
to age had in poetry been largely governed by 
[ 223 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


a common attitude prevalent at the time. 
Shakespeare’s Sonnets , and a few individual 
lyrics by other men, are so well known to every 
reader of poetry that it is difficult to say how 
readily we could distinguish them without their 
familiarity, but beyond these it is safe to say 
of the great body of Elizabethan love lyric, 
with all its superb singing quality and varied 
command of imagery, that we could never with 
any certainty tell one poet from another by 
the nature of his attitude towards his subject. 
And so in a later age, although we may find 
one fashion contending with another, the re¬ 
spective sides are governed by their own rules 
and there is no reason why the poet who wrote 
“Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind” should not 
also have written “Ask me no more where Job 
bestows,” or, on the other hand, why the poet 
who wrote 

Shall I wasting in despair 
Die because a woman’s fair. . . . 

should not also have written 

Out upon it! I have lov’d 
Three whole days together. . . . 

[ 224 ] 


VICTORIAN LOVE POETRY 


With the return of love as a theme to Eng¬ 
lish poetry in the Romantic Revival, there was 
for a time no very decided movement either 
towards a general character or away from it. 
Wordsworth dealt with the subjective love 
emotion but very rarely, it inspired but a few 
verses of Keats’s best work, Byron’s poetic rank 
would have been very little affected if, with the 
the exception of two or three stanzas, he had 
not used the theme at all, and, apart from Shel¬ 
ley, Landor is the only other poet who contrib¬ 
uted any considerable love poetry to an age 
which was mostly concerned in other directions. 
Shelley’s great and personal love poetry stands 
by itself in its time, as did Donne’s at an earlier 
period. But, generally speaking, it may be 
said that in each age before the Victorians when 
love poetry had been a common practice in Eng¬ 
lish verse it had been marked always by ref¬ 
erence to some general attitude, with the result 
that although it had never been deficient in 
lyric beauty it had been, apart from individual 
exceptions like Donne and Shelley, definitely 
limited in its psychological interest. With the 
Victorians, however, the most striking thing in 
[ 225 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


this matter is that every poet of any conse¬ 
quence wrote love poetry and wrote a good 
deal of it, and it is never possible for a mo¬ 
ment to confuse the love poetry of one with 
that of any other. The specific nature of each 
poet’s individual contribution could only be 
attempted in separate studies in detail of those 
poets and cannot be analysed in this brief study 
of general characteristics. But to read Tenny¬ 
son’s Maud , Browning’s Last Ride Together , 
A Woman's Last Word , A Pretty Woman , and 
The Lost Mistress , to choose four of his repre¬ 
sentative love poems, Rossetti’s House of Life , 
and Mrs. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portu¬ 
guese, Patmore’s Unknown Eros , and Swin¬ 
burne’s Dolores , is to pass through a succession 
of moods as different as they can well be in 
character and having nothing in common save 
that their attention is turned to one centre. 
And there is no likelihood of time slowly in¬ 
vesting this heterogeneous body of poetry with 
a common character as it has done with the 
love poetry of past epochs. No formula can 
ever be invented that shall include the social 
conscience and romantic tenderness of Maud , 
[ 226 ] 


VICTORIAN LOVE POETRY 

Browning’s passionate but ruthless psychologi¬ 
cal subtlety, Rossetti’s entranced voluptuous¬ 
ness, the proud surrender of the Sonnets from 
the Portuguese , Patmore’s transfigured worldli¬ 
ness and Swinburne’s enraptured embodiment 
of an abstract passion in a substantial image. 
In Victorian love poetry there is no dominant 
figure but that of love itself, but the theme is 
celebrated with an orchestral fulness that had 
never before been attained. 

Coming, as they did, after Wordsworth 
and Shelley and Keats, it cannot perhaps be 
claimed for the Victorian poets that they added 
notably to the spiritual revelation of nature, 
but it can be said in their praise that they were 
nearly all of them endowed with a very graphic 
gift of exact observation of the natural world. 
Victorian poetry is alight with phrases in which 
a natural mood or object is set down with the 
most tender and vivid precision. Tennyson’s 
planet of Love, 

Beginning to faint in the light that she loves 
On a bed of daffodil sky. . . . 


Mrs. Browning’s delicate landscape where 

[ 227 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


sheep are cropping 
The slant grass and daisies pale, 

And five apple trees stand dropping 
Separate shadows toward the vale. . . . 

FitzGerald’s 

strip of herbage strown 

That just outside divides the desert from the 
sown. . . . 


Christina Rossetti’s image, as telling as one of 
Marvell’s, of the 

Green nest full of pleasant shade, 

Wherein three speckled eggs were laid. . . . 

Browning’s “pear hung basking over a wall,” 
Arnold’s 

Have I not pass’d thee on the wooden bridge 
Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow, 

Thy face towards Hinksey and its wintry ridge. . . . 

Patmore’s 

The buried bulb does know 
The signals of the year, 

And hails far summer with his lifted spear. . . . 

[ 228 ] 


VICTORIAN LOVE POETRY 


Morris’s 


I know a little garden close 

Set thick with lily and red rose. . . . 

and Rossetti’s “ground-whirl of the perished 
leaves of hope,” such things can be matched 
on almost any page of any considerable poet 
of the time. The age may have been not very 
much concerned with the interpretation of na¬ 
ture in Wordsworth’s prophetic sense, but the 
easy mastery over such images as those just 
given gave to the poetry of the time a common 
background of rich and varied natural beauty, 
very bright in line and colour. 


[ 229 ] 


Chapter VI 

Conclusion 


N OTHING is vainer than for criticism of 
poetry to suppose that it can give any¬ 
thing of the pleasure to be found in poetry it¬ 
self. In making these notes about Victorian 
poetry, and in reading over again the work of 
the masters who wrote it, I am acutely aware 
how dismally inadequate any commentary upon 
such work must be. I am aware, also, that one 
could confront every generalisation that one 
makes with some modifying example; I have, 
for instance, since saying what I did about the 
love poetry of by-gone ages, been haunted by 
Bishop King’s exquisitely personal and touching 
Exequy on his “dead saint.” But these exercises 
have their times, and they are at least an occa¬ 
sion for refreshing memories that are apt to be¬ 
come a little dulled even for the most loyal and 
industrious of us. Further, abstract theorising 
about art at least does the art no harm and may 
[ 230 ] 


CONCLUSION 


sometimes serve it. No one is likely to read 
the Morte cTArthur or the Garden of Proser¬ 
pine or the Scholar Gipsy or Pippa Passes with 
any more poetic delight for anything that he 
may find in this essay, but here and there a 
friendly mind may get a little pleasure of a 
real though less essential kind in considering 
for a moment, apart from the fundamental 
things of poetry that persist from one genera¬ 
tion to another, what were the characteristics 
that distinguished an age, of which these are 
representative creations, from the other ages 
with which it has now taken an equal and im¬ 
mortal place. 


[ 231 ] 





I 





3 







INDEX 


A 

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 
19 

Arnold, Matthew, 20, 21, 
31, 32, 55, 66, 102, 
109-114, 121-125, 134, 
149, 151, 173,210, 220, 
228 

Aytoun, William Ed- 
mondstoune, 169 

B 

Beardsley, Aubrey, 143 
Blake, William, 23, 24, 
31, 211 

Bottomley, Gordon, 20 
Bridges, Robert, 107 
Bronte, Emily, 219 
Brooke, Stopford, 202 
Brown, T. E., 143, 146 
Browne, Thomas, 114 
Browning, Robert, 22, 32, 
55, 92-103, 109, 114- 
117, 119, 142-147, 153, 
156, 173, 210, 212, 
217, 220, 226, 228 
Browning, Elizabeth Bar¬ 
rett, 22, 214, 220, 226, 
227 


Bunyan, John, 165 
Burbage, Richard, 64 
Burns, Robert, 49 
Butler, Dr. (of Trinity), 
202 

Byron, Lord, 22, 26, 49, 
54, 64, 77, 94, 96, 125, 
200, 225 

C 

Chapman, George, 51 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 35-37, 
41, 56-59, 72, 74, 126, 
131, 167, 170-173 
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 
104, 107 

Coleridge, Samuel Tay- 
lor, 52 

Collins, William, 23, 24, 
44 

Cory, William, 105 
Crashaw, Richard, 17, 41, 
219 

D 

Dante, Alighieri, 223 
Davies, W. H., 19 
Disraeli, Lord Beacons- 
field, 202 


[ 233 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Dixon, Richard Watson, 
106, 107 

Domett, Alfred, 143, 
145 

Donne, John, 17, 31, 38, 
78, 114, 212, 225 
Dowson, Ernest, 143 
Drayton, Michael, 215 
Dryden, John, 17, 200 

E 

Eliot, George, 202 
F 

FitzGerald, Edward, 202, 
207, 215-219, 228 

G 

Galsworthy, John, 66 
Gibson, Wilfred Wilson, 
19 

Gladstone, W. E., 202 
Gordon, General, 202 
Gosse, Edmund, 182 
Gray, Thomas, 23, 24, 
43, 47, 110, 112 
Green, J. R., 202 
Green, Matthew, 46 

H 

Hammond, James, 221 
Hardy, Thomas, 30 
Herbert, George, 41 


Herrick, Robert, 17-20, 
78, 215 

Hodgson, Ralph, 219 
Homer, 160, 174 
Horne, Richard Hengist, 
143 

Housman, A. E., 19 
Huxley, Professor, 202 

J 

Jago, Richard, 44 
Jonson, Ben, 31, 66 
Jowett, Benjamin, 202, 
207 

K 

Keats, John, 22, 25, 31, 
51, 54, 63, 77, 89, 94, 
114, 125, 138, 225, 
227 

Kendon, Frank, 30 
King, Henry, 17, 230 

L 

Landor, Walter Savage, 
22, 53, 225 


Longfellow, Henry Wads¬ 
worth, 114 


Lovelace, 
31, 38 

Richard, 

17, 

Macaulay, 

M 

Lord, 

167, 


172 


[ 234 ] 


INDEX 


Malory, 178, 184 
Mare, Walter de la, 19, 
28 

Marlowe, Christopher, 51 
Marsh, Edward, 18 
Marvell, Andrew, 122, 
139, 228 

Masefield, John, 19, 163 
Meynell, Alice, 19, 150, 
151 

Milton, John, 18, 20, 33, 
38, 69, 77, 94, 110, 
112, 118, 125, 137, 
160, 194-199, 204, 210, 
221 

Morris, William, 22, 29, 
55, 125, 128-134, 142, 
149, 169-173, 217, 229 
Murray, Gilbert, 105 

N 

Nicolson, Harold, 161, 
203 

P 

Palgrave, Francis, 202 
Patmore, Coventry, 148- 
154, 220, 226-228 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 114 
Pope, Alexander, 23, 25, 
41, 45, 77, 195-198, 
200, 204-207, 211 

R 

Roden, Noel, 105 


Rossetti, Christina, 22, 
55, 215, 220, 228 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 
22, 55, 91, 125-129, 
133, 202, 226-229 

S 

Saintsbury, Professor, 
110, 125 

Scott, Sir Walter, 166, 
167, 172, 200 

Shakespeare, William, 37, 
58-66, 68, 77, 122, 
137, 159, 174, 187, 
191-198, 204, 205, 210, 
216, 224 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 
25, 31, 50, 55, 125, 
159, 187, 225-227 

Smart, Christopher, 211 

Spenser, Edmund, 51, 
125 

Suckling, Sir John, 31 

Swinburne, Algernon C., 

20-22, 28, 55, 125, 134- 
141, 149, 173, 186, 226, 
227 

Sylvester, Joshua, 218 

T 

Tabley, Lord de, 91, 106, 
107 

Taylor, Jeremy, 113 


[ 235 ] 


VICTORIAN POETRY 


Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 
22, 30, 55, 57, 62, 66, 
71-95, 102, 106-114, 
125, 133-138, 142, 144, 
149, 153, 156, 161- 
163, 173, 176-192, 199- 
210, 213, 220, 226 
Tennyson, Frederick, 104 
Thackeray, William 
Makepeace, 202 
Thompson, Francis, 150 
Tindall, Professor, 202 

V 

Vaughan, Henry, 17, 31, 
40, 114, 139,211 


Vere, Aubrey de, 104, 
114, 123 

W 

Walker, Professor Hugh, 
169 

Walton, Izaak, 114 
Watson, Sir William, 
120 

Webster, John, 31 
Whitman, Walt, 33 
Wordsworth, William, 22- 
24, 30, 46-49, 52, 62, 
78, 111, 112, 119, 125, 
138, 166, 196-199, 210, 
225, 227, 229. 


[ 236 ] 



s 











































* 




4 





















« 























\ 








s 









































. > 











y 





















. 






. 
































f' 













V 
















































\ ■ 






V 








V 

















"V v 


i . v. 

■ : ■ , 



















































- 





















































. 





















4 


i 

























































































V? 

























\ 






■ 








- 








1 • 

- V 

\ 


















< 

■ 




. 


■ 

/ 







* 


. -/ 














































































- 

■ ' V' : < 

MAY 5> 



5 1324 






































































